How, exactly, was my relationship with Indy defined by mercury? 

It starts with Discover magazine. 

I was on leave from work, out having breakfast with Indy, when Indy slid an issue of Discover across the table to me. 

In its back pages, the National Institutes of Health advertised grant money for research on elemental mercury.  

“You’re not working,” Indy said. “You should apply for the grant.” 

And he was right. I wasn’t working.  

Probably because I’d been a mother for just under eight weeks. 

But Indy, well — Indy thought I could do anything. 

Like, for example, the time Indy asked me to get hospital records on his brother. He’d had a tracheostomy as an adolescent. Indy was curious to know more about it. 

That this brother was dead, had been treated at a now-shuttered hospital, and likely had the tracheostomy in the 1930s — Indy thought these unlikely hindrances for my abilities. 

Or the time Indy saw an interview on PBS. The subject mentioned an adult Phillies baseball camp. Participants could play America’s greatest pastime with the Phils themselves. 

Indy wasn’t sure on which PBS station he’d seen the interview, or what show, or who was interviewed, or where the camp was, or even if it still existed. 

But he wanted me to find it because he wanted to send Willie. 

Maybe it was because I actually found that interview — and the camp — that Indy figured I could run the mercury lab. 

Later that day, as our colicky daughter screamed into hour four, and our dinner went cold, and we sat with the tub running because the sound soothed our fussy baby, I recounted the story of the mercury grant to my husband. 

“Well,” he teased as our bellies rumbled and our water bill exploded, “what else are you doing?” 

From that day to this, if my husband asks me to do something, or if I don’t get to a task, we lay the blame on my mercury research. 

Can I pick up the dry cleaning today? Well, no — my mercury study. 

Did I finish painting the bathroom? No — I’m in the throes of a mercury study. 

And when we talk about all the things I did for Indy during his illness, or all the things I’m doing for Willie during hers — we always top it off with an exasperated “All while working on the mercury study!” 

So when we scrapped Indy’s car back in 2022, and I found a rusted Maxwell House coffee can filled with vials of mercury — well. It just felt apropos. 

Indy, once upon a time, was an HVAC repairman. The mercury vials were the kind you’d find in old thermostats. 

Anyone capable of finding the Phillies camp from a snippet of an interview she didn’t even see is going to know she can’t just throw away mercury with the weekly trash. 

But I was too busy to deal with the mercury at the time. So I stashed the coffee can in our garage, next to my uncle’s ashes. 

“That’s quite the collection you have going on in there,” my husband said one day. “What do you plan on doing with the ashes? And the mercury?” 

Like he didn’t have a fox skull sealed in a Tupperware of bleach lingering in that same garage. 

I told him I couldn’t deal with the ashes or mercury at the moment because my mercury study had reached a critical point. 

The ashes are long gone, but the coffee can full of mercury — well, that still sits on an old end table, in the corner of the garage. 

Pennsylvania has a take-back program for mercury thermometers. A disposal facility is just up the street from my house.  

So one overcast day a few weeks ago, I dropped off the mercury. 

No questions asked. I didn’t have to identify myself. Or explain why I had the mercury. Or sign anything. I just handed over the can. 

Of mercury. I handed a coffee can full of mercury thermostats banned nearly sixteen years ago to complete strangers.  

And they took them.  

Huh. 

That should really be a part of my mercury study. 

Don’t you think?