Postmortem
I am thinking about death these days, mortality. It pops into my mind from time to time and I don’t shirk away because there is work that needs doing if I am to die, which, I stop to remind myself, I will.
There was a woman here in our elementary school community who recently died in her sleep, just like that. Gone. Her youngest is the age of my oldest. My grandparents also died not too long ago. Their long extraordinary lives made the death easier to comprehend it is true, but death is never easy to grasp no matter your belief system. Here today and all the beautiful yesterdays, then gone tomorrow. Finality.
In my family my husband and I have become highly specialized in our own fields. He earns the dough, I raise the kids. This arrangement works for us but lately it has me in a periodic panic: What happens if I should suddenly die? How on earth will he manage? Little things (or medium) set off the response. The other week he wanted to know the password to our online banking. Do you mean to tell me he didn’t already know it?
Stephanie, when was the last time he paid the bills?
Point made.
So I set forth into the wilderness that lies between us as we sat at the kitchen table recently and attempted to make inroads into the bulk of knowledge I must pass to my husband quickly just in case I slammed into a tree with the Camry on my way to get milk and bagels the next day.
“Bill,” I said, positioning myself square to him, my face in its every atom serious as serious, “In case I die, this is where I keep all of Quinn’s ongoing homework assignments, in this basket here. Are you looking?”
He looked but I knew he forgot the moment his eyes fell on the wicker container. He was eating. He was tired. He was thinking about work. He was thinking, as would be expected, I’ll deal with it when she dies. And not a minute sooner.
But how will he find anything then?
Then there was another concern even more immediate: my husband’s new wife. You know, the next wife after he’s widowed. I told him, “Bill you’ll need to get remarried. The kids will need a mother.”
“I know,” he said.
I am worried that he won’t find a good new wife with all the weight he’s put on. He seriously needs to go on a diet in case I crash in the plane on the way home from the Boston Marathon (not on the way there, I am imagining, because I will run that race before I die in a perfect world.) I couldn’t very well say this verbatim to him, but I hinted at it.
“Honey,” I told him gently, “I think you’re going to need to shed a few pounds if you suddenly find the need to start dating again.” But he turned cocky.
“I won’t have any trouble finding someone else.”
“Well it might be slim pickins. You never know.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say that whomever you find, I’ve decided, must first be screened by the women in our family. She’d have to get a green light.” This could narrow down his choices even more.
“I see,” he says.
“Yea. I need to tell them about this. It would be your sister, my mom, and my sisters. Oh. Lena, too.” Lena is our soon-to-be ex-sister-in-law. She’s a good reader of women. I want her on my team.
“Bill,” I told him, “What if you’re hopelessly in love with some woman and can’t see her true colors? You see what I mean? Haven’t you heard stories of the new second wife coming in sweet as honey only to turn on the husband’s kids once she gives birth to the husband’s new baby? It’s like, out with the old, in with the new. Other women can smell a good woman a mile away. A guy in love can only see breasts.”
“Breasts are good.”
“Listen: every Friday Quinn has a spelling test. He needs to read at least twenty minutes every day then he’ll get a free Pizza Hut pizza each month. I should write this stuff down. You must go to the library and check out the limit on your library card of kids books. Regularly! That’s why they’re such good readers. Don’t only read Calvin and Hobbes to them.”
“They love Calvin and Hobbes.”
“Weekends will be totally taken up by them. You know that don’t you? How will you find a wife?”
“Sweetheart, if you should die, it would be devastating. It would take me a long time to recover, but the kids and I would do the best we could under the circumstances. I’m sure we’d get a lot of help from family and friends. Try not to worry.”
“I worry.”
“I know.”
“Quinn buys lunch on Fridays. Pizza day. You have to make sure his lunch account is up to date. Do you know how to do this? It’s online. Every book we read to Max gets recorded on that paper on the frig. See it on the top?”
I laced up my running shoes. I was thinking of the stories of people’s hearts conking out on them mid-run. Perfectly fit individuals gone into cardiac arrest doing what they love best. Not a bad way to go, but a disturbing thought as I clipped the water belt around my waist. Of course, there was always the possiblity of being hit by a car.
“Have a good run,” Bill said as I opened the front door. “When will you be back?”
“I won’t be too long. Hour. Hour and a half.”
“Well, don’t take forever. I have things to do.”
I closed the door behind me, fiddled with my ipod, then suddenly: Did he just say ‘forever’? I took a deep breath as I launched into my run and hoped for the best.
