“I am four days sober.”
How can we stand in a moment, experience a moment, and not know the profundity of it? Did Mark know the journey he was undertaking when he said those words to me? Did I know we had actually stepped off of a beaten trail and were creating an entirely new path? I had recently gotten home from a photoshoot, light moved across the kitchen, he stood in front of me. He is so small and yet so big. His silver hair. His strong chin. His straight nose. I am four days sober. Eyes so blue they could break glass stared back at me.
A man can bare his soul in the kitchen on an ordinary regular day.
Would I have changed my reaction if I had known? Would I go back and throw my arms around him, shout my pride, my love, my elation? Or, was my reserved head nod, my “Ok, that’s good,” just right? The Butterfly Effect quickly becomes a Paradox of Choice in the dance of dealing with dueling timelines. Why wonder about what might have happened when we can wander in what is?
Mark had always drank. Some seasons more. Some seasons less. Sip. Slurp. Slam. He’d used it when writing. A lifetime of late nights. A muse that became a crutch. It had ebbed towards a new direction the beginning of 2024. A slope. A cliff. A fall. His dad had died. A business he started was done, a partnership done. How do we navigate loss?
Some nights Mark would come to bed past midnight, past two am, later and later, I’d wake up because the pH of the room changed when he arrived. The scent changed. What’s it like to smell a person killing themselves? I’d already lost a husband to a fall, I didn’t want to lose another. When does a heart break?
I asked Mark to come to bed before midnight, it was always the darkest parts of nights when he drank. Mark didn’t drink during the day, just alone and in his office late at night. “Just come to bed before midnight,” I asked. Which was saying, please don’t drink so much. This schedule would work for a few weeks and then later and later nights would creep back in. How do we help the ones we love?
We circled in this pattern for a while, for too long. Stagnation never my preferred environment but what about integration? What about marination? What about the slow accumulation of life and loss we must sit with before we become again and again and again? We can’t skip the steps of the cycle. What about the fucking cocoon a butterfly must metamorphosis within? Not my strength, not my comfort, not my best patience. I leaned heavily into work, Mark integrated, marinated, paused. Some seasons, we have to sit in the mess before we create anew. Maybe when we sit with it, we have a chance to break free from it. But we can’t sit forever. I am beside you, Love, but we have to stand soon. I need to know you can stand.
I didn’t know he’d cracked his cage when he told me those five words. He had stood up. I didn’t see the new path yet, I’d watched him hurt in the ruts for so long. You’ll have to show me with steps, Mark, we have to start walking.
Mark’s dad had died those few months earlier. Goodbye, Dad. Anyone who has lost an estranged parent knows, you don’t just mourn their death, you mourn the relationship that never was. The relationship that could have been. Sometimes it feels like our parents don’t choose us. That can break a child’s heart no matter their current age. Sometimes we question, if I was different, would they love me more?
I have a sticky note for myself in the bathroom that reads, “Your dad likes and loves you, he just doesn’t always know how to show it.”
A brain exercise. A heart exercise. A growth exercise. We can rewrite narrative. Rewire synapses. Being human is being messy. Imperfect. But we can learn to love others and our own imperfectness. Often when we can acknowledge and accept our own imperfections, we grant more grace to others. Projection shrinks. Righteousness shrinks. Empowerment grows.
Mark’s dad left when he was 10 years old, the precipice of navigating from boy to man. He went and started a new family across the country and Mark’s relationship with him never fully healed. Intermittent. Crossed connections. Miscommunications. Lack of tools to hold and speak feelings. A son that yearns to be seen. A dad who doesn’t know how to say, I love you, I care.
Mark’s dad died. Mark mourned. But after he spoke the five words to me, he didn’t pick up a drink again.
Mark began navigating the closure of the business. The end of a few dear friendships. He didn’t pick up a drink. Untruths were spoken about him. Written about him. He didn’t try to shout his side, his heart, his truth. He just observed. Not asking others for validation is freedom, it’s also kindness. Relationships are heart and they are free. Autonomy always and for everyone. Mark always encouraged questioning, anyone was free to ask, to question, to check in. He didn’t pick up a drink.
He began to go to bed early so he’d be fresh, alert, and keen to hike with Easton, our dog, early in the morning before the heat of the day. From 3:00am bedtimes to 9pm - the early riser in me was ecstatic to go to sleep together. Side by side. “Ring ring ring!” Mark Twight’s alarm sounding off at 5am, out the door before 5:30am and to the mountains with his direwolf at his side. Did Easton save Mark?
Scott Backes came and stayed with us. Mark’s lifelong climbing partner and best friend. Soul brother. He came to town and the two men cheered for me at The Rut VK, my favorite race, a 3,600 feet of gain 5K to the top of a mountain. They cheered, Mark watched, and afterwards he entered the race for 2025. Initiative. Action. Effort. I’ll walk with you, Love. I’ll run too.
He started to hike up hills faster again. Two hip replacements and a fused ankle (5 screws through his ankle bones, a fixed 90 degree angle, and a floating fibula). Push. Red face. Sweat. Elevated heart rate. Sucking oxygen. He didn’t have the balance and ease he once had but he kept taking steps. Mark started tracking workouts again. Timing. First, just with Easton and then on his own. Did Easton save him? His by his side companion. He’ll walk with you too, Mark. Sometimes, it’s easier to care for another than to care for ourselves. Sometimes, the most treasured relationships of our lives accomplish both. Ayoooooooo!
Mark started doing treadmill workouts when he didn’t have time to get to the mountains. He lost 12lbs. He didn’t have 12lbs to lose. He didn’t pick up a drink. He’d blast metal music in our home gym and push himself in his new body. He ached for his old body less than before, working to accept the new one. The new older one. Where can I go with this one? What’s still in these bones and heart and sinews? Let’s draw it forward.
Then, Mark’s mother died.
No more parents.
All within a year.
How do we navigate loss?
Sometimes when we experience deep personal loss we’re able to bring the best qualities of ourselves forward. Inspired and moved by what we’ve experienced we offer the marrow of ourselves to this lifetime. Sometimes when we experience deep personal loss our not-best qualities are drawn forward. Paranoid, afraid, and hurt - what’s the old adage? Hurt people, hurt people. More often, we dance between the two; the light and the shadow. The totality of the human experience. Mark sat for a long time, he circled. Let’s go love, life is short. Then, he stood.
Mark didn’t pick up a drink. He took a step. And then he took another one.
He said those five words and each day the statement but not the sentiment changed: I am five days sober. I am 71 days sober. I am 127 days sober. On and on they grew.
His color changed. His scent. His movement. His strength. His energy. Our home changed. Our lives changed. He read. He wrote. He cared for our pets, our friends, our home. He loved. All in the quiet spaces of heart and home, in a time when our culture can lean towards digital and public screaming, an attention economy where everyone loses, Mark did the work quietly. My friend, Karen, refers to social media as collective wounding. I wish it wasn’t, I’ve had so much good come through the unseen wires of connection, but more and more it feels consumptive. Hurtful. And in its worst moments, intentionally cruel.
Mark quietly navigated. He uttered just five words in our kitchen and everything changed. Sometimes, we show our love by trying to live longer.
Mark loves my first husband, he turns to him for advice, guidance, mentorship even though Travis was so much younger in Earth Years. I stand in the middle of an intersection between two great men learning from one another, guiding each other, loving one another across lines of time. Do you see what this means? Mark loves Trav. Trav loved Mark. They love the totality of me. Mark loves the man that helped me live and learn to love. He even loves the loss inside of me because it makes me me. He would never want me to have to live through a loss like that again and yet we know and acknowledge our age difference. Mark is 24 years my senior. Not all, but there are many chances I outlive him. But he is doing everything he can to be here as long as possible. A love to live.
Mark has moved through countless stunning and profound evolutions in his life - to witness one firsthand - I am forever changed in the process. The duality of transformation is it takes part awareness and stillness and then it takes action and committed effort. I am reminded to become again and again in my own life no matter how hard the work and effort. You can lose so much that the scent of death emanates from you. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar's body breaks down into "tissue cell soup" during metamorphosis. I remember when that soup used to walk upstairs to go to bed. I remember that smell. This "soup" then reforms into the structures of an adult butterfly, including wings, legs, and antennae but not a drink. Transformation can be a death to the system that was and a complete restructuring. Rebirth. And we can do the work in the quiet spaces of chrysalis, of home and heart. Nothing to prove means freedom. Sometimes in our great efforts of change we deeply ache to be different, better, that we lean into the great fallacy of righteousness. Nothing to prove means removing the boundary of righteousness that we think protects us. Righteousness doesn’t protect us from whomever we’ve deemed “Other”, less than, as we wish it did, it blocks us from seeing the parts of ourselves that we won’t acknowledge. To crack the cage, first you have to see it. Then you have to forgive it.
A few months before Travis died we went for a snowy burb run, I encouraged him to attend one of Mark’s symposiums. “What if you’re not supposed to meet your idols?” he said to me as we jogged past the neighborhood middle school, afraid to lose a lighthouse that had guided him for much of his life, Trav was unsure. I said, “I think you’re supposed to let them be human and love them anyway.”
I am grateful for every person that has let me be human and then loved me. What more can we offer one another? What more can we offer ourselves? But to find love within the imperfection, the existential soup we all carry.
Mark is more than the man I could have imagined back on that snowy run because I could have never imaged the connections that would bring us together and the challenges we would face side by side. He is extraordinary while stunningly and simply human. How special to witness and love the totality. His heart and spine, endless in care and strength, and those blue eyes that can crack glass, navigate with grace. Nothing to prove, everything to experience. I learn constantly just by watching him. We can have many rebirths. Sit. Stand. Step.
Transformation can look a lot like freedom.
And, love.
Today, those five words are: I am 365 days sober.
I can’t wait to see where our new older bodies can wander side by side.
I do not know of any other author that is even capable of transmitting the emotion, the heart, the heaviness of this. Blair, you are a blessing to all of us. Thank you for sharing.
Holy shit! That is some fucking writing. I mean sure, I am a Twight fan. And I am sober. But Jesus that is some amazing writing. Wow. That sort of concentration and willingness from a writer, holy shit. Jesus. Man that is amazing writing. Way to go Blair.