Here’s your prompt. You know we are all mortal. You know we gotta go sometime. So, what do you do to prepare for death. You are heading in to a medical operation in a few days, and you know death is a possibility. Here goes:
A Basket of Minutes
Every time I have surgery, I get ready to die. That’s because once you are all prepped- IV in arm, johnny riding up around your waist, warm sterile blankets tucked around you to counteract the chill in the prep rooms- then they bring that paper to you. The one that outlines all the risks associated with anesthesia and the surgery of the day- and one of the possible outcomes is death.
I don’t usually gamble. I buy maybe five sweepstakes tickets a year. But there you are, gambling with your life. And this is true whether you are going in for heart surgery, stomach reduction, joint replacement or a dang face lift.
So I get ready to die. I send everyone out of the house. I don’t want them to know what I am doing. And then I sit down and make a list. What will they need if I never wake up?
Of course, my will, my life insurance, my directives. Cremate and sprinkle. Don’t you dare bury me. But that is the simple stuff.
The more irksome is the electronic digital stuff.
The paperless (eco-friendly) bills that come in over my eMail (so don’t close my eMail). Or the electricity will be shut off and the natural gas stop flowing.
Credit cards, my websites, my website hosting, my blog, the social media (yeah, tell ‘em I’m dead on Facebook). They all have passwords. And…
Is my password list up to date? I test every site. Tedious work.
The automatic withdrawals. Don’t close any bank accounts until you redirect the auto insurance, AAA, the cable, the pet health insurance, the garbage man, Netflix, Ancestry.com (add my death date first), Norton anti-virus- I hope it’s working. God, what else? How did electronic life get so mercenary? Suck, suck, suck.
My novel! My precious print-on-demand book. My Kindle offering to the world. Passwords for Amazon KDP, Ingram Spark, my author page, and for the documents on Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft Drive and Carbonite.
It’s so complicated to leave the earth now. So many electronic tethers. It actually makes me more nauseous to think of this digital mess than it does to think of my upcoming knee replacement.
So, in the quiet rooms of my house, I am feverishly laying out the flowchart of my newfangled modern life. I just hope I live through the operation in spite of the death threat so I can clean up this mess. Fingers crossed.
April 22, 2022 Irene M. Paine