CHANGING LANES
How a widow took to the road with her two daughters on a journey to grieve and heal
After her husband, Mark Pittman, died of a massive heart attack at age 52, Westchester mom of two Laura Fahrenthold, now 54, struggled to cope. Here, the women’smagazine editor and author of the new memoir “The Pink Steering Wheel Chronicles: A Love Story” (Hatherleigh Press) tells JANE RIDLEY how an extraordinary 31,000-mile adventure in an RV helped her family heal.
STANDING on a 3-foot-wide ledge, I froze as my older daughter, Nell, reached out to grab the bag attached to my waist. She then dispersed a handful of my husband’s ashes down the mountain.
Some of the ashes landed on the ledge.
“Look, Mom,” said Nell. “Dad’s right by your feet. He’s here now, and if I can do this and even he can do this, then you can do this.”
It was nearly two years since the death of my husband, and I was still finding it hard adapting to life as a widow. I missed Mark greatly and couldn’t accept the thought of raising our gorgeous kids without him. I couldn’t bring myself to give away his clothes, and I struggled with loneliness.
Terrified of heights on that mountaintop in Quebec, I didn’t feel triumphant. But there was a purpose behind the deed: We were returning Mark’s remains to the land he loved, and learning how to deal with loss.
Mark and I were together for 15 years. We met in 1994 as journalists at an upstate New York newspaper. Our daughters, Nell, now 18, and Susannah, 17, were the light of our lives. But Mark, who wasn’t in the best shape — he was 6 feet, 4 inches tall and 280 pounds — was also married to the job.
While working at Bloomberg News in Manhattan, he became internationally known as the award-winning reporter who sued the Federal Reserve to release documents about its knowledge of the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. On Nov. 25, 2009, in the middle of his court battle with the Fed, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He’d had another cardiac event nine years earlier that had led to stent surgery and doctors’ orders to improve his diet and exercise more, but he never really stuck to the plan.
Our girls, then 9 and 11, and I, witnessed his violent death in a hallway of our house in Yonkers. It left horrible emotional scars. But, when he was cremated, my gallows humor kicked in. Presented with his ashes in a small black container, I started calling it Mark-in-a-Box. I tucked it under my arm and began taking it with me when we went on vacation, to know my husband was near.
I got the idea of sprinkling Mark’s ashes while on a camping trip in Oregon in 2010, around eight months after his death. I desperately needed the bathroom but was terrified of what I might encounter outside the tent. Then I realized I could take Mark-in-aBox and he would protect me.
I trotted toward the outhouse, Mark-in-a-Box in one hand, flashlight in the other. Only I tripped over my own feet and landed, splat! I had face-planted and was covered in ash — Mark’s ashes.
I wondered if Mark had waited until the perfect moment to let me know he wanted out — out of his box! And not necessarily just at the campground. Maybe I could pick out all the places he would want to go and sprinkle a little of his ashes at each location.
Shortly afterward, I invested $4,200 in a 1993 Toyota Dolphin, a fully equipped motor home that we nicknamed HaRVey. Now Nell, Susannah and I could spread Mark in California, Idaho, Montana — all the way home to New York.
The girls and I took four RV trips between 2010 and 2014, and we sprinkled him everywhere from the Grand Canyon to Niagara Falls, from Philadelphia (where Rocky ran up the steps) to Graceland. One of the most poignant places we left Mark was outside the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC. The lawsuit Mark had launched against the Fed was won in March 2010, not long after his death.
On our fourth trip, in 2014, we were at the Hopi Mesas in northern Arizona and came upon a stray dog who had been hanging around the grounds of a local diner for years. The girls were immediately taken with him, but I really didn’t want to take in a pet.
“I’m sure he’s lovely,” I told my daughters at first. “But I am not driving across the rest of the country with three teenagers [we’d been joined by one of the girls’ friends], all of their — ahem — clothes, and this giant dog in a 2-by-6-foot living space.”
But there was something about this dog and his pleading brown eyes that I couldn’t ignore. It felt as though he had a human’s soul; leaving him would have been like leaving your grandfather on the side of the highway. We named him Mesa and welcomed him into the family.
The sprinkling of the ashes came to an end that same summer. We were in Kansas, the state of Mark’s birth. Sunflowers had always had special significance for us. He’d once led me blindfolded into a field of them and told me he loved me, and the girls and I came across the same field, which was near where he’d grown up.
This was the one time I needed to be strongest. For him. For me. For our families. But mostly for our daughters. The time had come to say goodbye. He was home now.
Nell, Susannah and I fell silent as we dug into the box, bracing ourselves against the beauty of the waving yellow fields. Loosening my hold, I let the grit slip through the spaces between my fingers as I started the countdown. “One!” “Two,” Nell called out. “Three!” Susannah cheered. We drew our arms across our hearts, and then let Mark fly up and out over the sun-kissed field and into the bright blue sky.