My cousin has been a widow for 10 days. She is exactly my age. Her husband's last minutes were on a couch at their lake house in Michigan; he went up to open it for the season, and his heart stopped.It's weird when your contemporaries are widowed. I suppose I have reached that certain age, and am not sure I like it. I feel like I am standing in line at an anonymous deli counter, or the layaway desk at Christmas time. The line is so long it snakes out the door and doubles back on itself, but it is impossible to tell where I am in the line. Am I at the back of the line, in the middle? Am I the next widow?
And so begins the innumberable, unending counting, the numbers, the health measures we will take as if they are voodoo amulets AND the Ten Commandments all rolled into one. If I make my husband eat enough flax seed, do I get a 3 year bonus?
No one knows.
I got caught flat-footed on sympathy knitting. Both Jean and her daughter Kelly (her father's wake scooched a day so it wouldn't fall on her Sweet Sixteen) need something, and I need to settle on patterns ASAP.
4 comments:
my sympathies, and I share those exact same thoughts, where am I on the list, what can I do to prolong my time here!!!
i am in the same line.
very elegantly put. I'm there...at the counter every time Hubs goes to work. After a while you sorta go numb and stop thinking about the phone call that may/may not come. The arrangements you will be forced to make. The forever empty bed you will have to face.
The thought surfaces now and then, and I just try to push it back down. Though I like to think I'm making a few better choices.
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