This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
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I remember sixty-four. It was like yesterday. I woke up, rolled over, and my wife of eighteen years was staring at me. Finally she said, “You still here?” I laugh out loud when I think about that morning. For years, I told everyone who cared to listen, that I would die at sixty-four just as my father, grandfather, two uncles and two first cousins had. When I brushed passed that fateful year, I breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t remember why, but I did. My wife’s humor still lingers with me; always at the forefront of my musings.
I met my wife after having a first marriage dissolve over irreconcilable differences. Scarred from that relationship, I didn’t want to meet anyone that I might fall in love with and replicate my misery, so I generally dated women who were safe. By safe, I mean, the chance of my asking them out on a second date were slim-to-none.
What could be safer than a chance meeting with a nineteen year old girl, and me, packing forty-six years on a burgeoning frame? Safe; indeed. The minute we were alone I realized that this diamond-in-the-rough required only a minimum of polishing to become a rare sparkling gem. Her intelligence quotient was ridiculously high, as she absorbed everything within her periphery as easily as a duck to water. She simply blew me away. Before I realized it, this old guy was in love.
Now, twenty-four years later, the budding feelings I had, matured into a lifelong love story that transcended all marital bumps. Bumps that often occurred because my intransigence overtook my rational thoughts. In other words, I generally acted like an ass. She always forgave me and let me know that she really loved me, in spite of my being an ass.
One day she returned from a routine doctor’s visit and told me that her pap smear was positive; that she needed to start a regimen of chemotherapy. Immediately. When I finished consoling her and telling her that “everything was going to be all right,” I went outside, hid myself, and cried unmercifully. “Please God. Don’t do this to me.”
After weathering the indignities the medical profession foists on its cancer patients, her frail body finally had enough. She died in my arms, tears streaming down my cheeks, and an emptiness that would never subside, was now firmly ensconced in my belly. Dame Fate is a vicious bitch. I was supposed to die long before her. That’s how all the medical journals read. The priest’s words at the funeral were designed to comfort the bereaved, but I took nothing but resentment from that service. Resentment against God for doing this to me. Me of all people.
Friends called, and I was generally relieved when they either hung up or left my house on their rare visit. When I was alone, I was in pain and when I was with others, the pain was only exacerbated. Better off alone, was my ultimate conclusion.
Now, five years later, I have begun emerging from my shell. I am an old man of seventy-one. I sometimes spend a day with either of my children from the first marriage, and watch, as my grandchildren sprout up like unchecked weeds.
I keep a dog, because it’s company for me.
“Why didn’t you take me at sixty-four, God, like you were supposed to? You took the wrong one. Don’t you know that?”
