Death is my traveling companion.
We prepare for a dream trip to France and these items are on my list of things to accomplish before we board our first flight.
The drapes are at the alteration shop by the UPS store in the shopping center with the Subway, I tell Ray. In case anything happens to me, you’ll need to pick up the drapes.
He smiles sweetly and raises one eyebrow. He understands why I say these things.
To our children, my mother and my sister, I send a list of where we will be and the dates of each stay. The Hotel Saint Dominique with a link to its website where everything is in French. The camper van rental site. And lastly, the final hotel we’ll stay at the night before we fly home. Hopefully we will fly home.
I forget to send our airline info so I forward another email to our children. They may need this. Planes crash. I imagine them standing in their living rooms, tensely watching the news reports and waiting to match the flight number with the email I sent, like some backward version of watching the lottery results. There will be no dropped balls with numbers imprinted. Only wailing.
We book round trip tickets, but there are no guarantees. I am hyper aware that death may await my second husband and me on this trip just as it awaited my first husband and me in Alaska.
My patient husband tells me our kids and family will always be able to reach us by phone. Not if we’re dead, I tell him as my mind flashes back to images of tourists mown down by a terrorist in a renegade truck in a distant city…their bodies broken and bent and lying in the positions where they breathed their last.
We must update our will. And yet the night we sit down to discuss it, we cannot remember why we set things up the way we did. Was it because one of us might remarry after death? Was it because we were trying to do right by one another’s children?
The will is outdated. There is even a percentage of my money that will go to my father who has now been gone for five years.
I cannot have this discussion right now. There is too much emotion…too much stress. He lovingly smiles and says that’s okay. We can wait. He kindly does not mention that it was my idea to update the will.
Death is my traveling companion. I wonder what I would do if my husband were killed on his commute to work. Would I go on the trip? I ask my mother. No, you wouldn’t, she says. I pray harder for my sweet husband’s safety.
What if my mother dies while we’re gone, I wonder. What would I do? Would I come home immediately? Would I wait? Would my siblings want me to wait?
Stop your jitters and just be safe, my Mom tells me on the phone the morning we are to leave. I’m not nervous; I’m hyper aware. And there is a difference, I explain to her so she won’t worry about me.
It is not macabre that death is my traveling companion. I do not have a dark preoccupation with death.
I am simply very aware that death awaits us. And this awareness is heightened during travel because my first husband never came back from our trip.
I think of things that may seem disloyal to some. I ask my husband what is plan B for when you die?
Why am I going to die? he asks.
Well, if either of us die, I say unconvincingly.
I wonder what I will do when my husband is gone. Would I stay in this house? I think I would downsize, I decide. This house would be cavernous and lonely without him. I think I’ll get a gun.
I kiss him goodbye every morning, knowing this could be the last time I get to kiss him and tell him I love him.
Is it dishonorable to imagine a day without him? A life devoid of his graciousness toward me?
Death has hijacked something deep within me. It never fully leaves my side. It is a stowaway in my perception of what life is. Death lurks. Death hitchhikes. Death is not a roadblock. Death is the mechanical glitch that will break us down as we move forward.
Death is my traveling companion.
