The day I died

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Today began like so many of the other days that marked my life as an employee, mother and a faithful wife.

I did not stop working after Luca was born, I asked to work part-time and the owners of the business I worked for actually agreed. My husband had always been attentive to the needs of the family and followed our son’s growing years as any father whose time is consumed working as a lawyer most of every day could. 

I was looking at the wrinkles around my eyes, accentuated by the light of the incandescent bulbs above the mirror in the upstairs bathroom and, as I wiped away the makeup from my forty-something face, I thought I should have bought some more cotton discs. Oh, and shaving cream for Raffaele. “I’ll add them to the list on the sideboard in the kitchen, otherwise I’ll forget.” 

My husband was downstairs searching the fridge for a late-night snack, even though we had had an anything-but-small dinner earlier, but his survival instinct urged him to find a final bite of something before going to sleep. It made me smile. 

The bottle of lotion was nearly empty, and I told myself to add it to the list of things to get at the supermarket Saturday, when my husband would take me in the SUV, which he drove on weekends only, to do the shopping. The little city car he drove around town and to work with would stay in the garage. But on Saturday no one in the family would be doing any grocery shopping. They would be busy calling the funeral home and seeing the priest of the nearby church to talk about the service.

The church bells would have rung solemnly for me, and people, unaware of what had happened, would ask themselves “who died?”. Some of them would silently say an Eternal Peace, and then continue on with their day. Others would thank the heavens it was not them.

It was Friday evening. We had just finished the weekly get-together with friends from this town where we had all grown up, friends we shared our youth with. We knew each another since we were kids, we all went to the same elementary school – some earlier, others later – as it was the town’s only one. But it was not there that I fell in love with my husband, that happened when I went for a Master’s in the city.

Several years had passed since we had last seen one another. Our studies had taken us far from home, Raffaele had become a man and I didn’t even recognise him at first. He approached me timidly, afraid I would deny having known him when we were little, but that’s not what happened. I greeted him with pleasure once I realised who he was, in spite of the fact that his hair was thinning, which he made up for with a neat little goatee that was all the rage at the time. I convinced him to shave it off when we got engaged – it was prickly when we kissed.

My mother was immediately impressed by his frankness and she welcomed him like a son. Mind you, she had seen him grow up, his family lived two streets down from our house.

“Matilde, what do you say we get married?” he asked me one day over his mother’s lasagna. I was not surprised by the question. It was a given that Raffaele would have found a good job at a law firm, saved money so as not to weigh on his family and then decide it was the right time to get married. And so, with a bit of irony, I answered “Raffaele… whatever you think is best.” I then took another bite of lasagna, leaving him stunned as his mother gleefully watched on. 

We were good citizens, people you could count on, tranquil types, maybe even too normal, and so no one was surprised that the next step was the arrival of little Luca just over a year after the wedding. 

My son just recently turned 18. He has a mild manner about him, never gave us problems at school or his choice of friends. He plays basketball, but he’s not really the athletic type and when he can he prefers the company of a girl to practice. He has not, however, introduced us to his not-so-new girlfriend yet. 

What will Luca do now? My poor baby with so many years ahead of him, without his mother. Who will listen to him pour out his soul, who will iron his t-shirts for him, who will suddenly hug him at breakfast and plant a kiss on his young cheek? I’ll never meet his girlfriend, nor will I see him dressed as a handsome groom, nor see his tears when he becomes a father. 

Will he still go out with his buddies on Friday nights? Or will he choose another day, one that doesn’t remind that his mother died on a Friday.

And what about our friends? They’ll think that if it happened to me, the youngest of the group, is their time nearing? That it can happen at any time, without warning?

Aldo will check his blood pressure every morning, at least for a few months. Michele will have “you-never-know” blood tests done. Claudia will say she’ll quit smoking, but in the end she’ll lack the willpower. 

Almost all fifty-somethings now, most of our friends are either single or divorced.

I always felt they were a bit envious of Raffaele and me because we beat the statistics that wanted us among the divorced.

It wasn’t easy to get to almost 20 years of marriage without any sort of fracture between us. We’ve had our ups and downs too, and, the natural propensity towards male egoism notwithstanding, we worked hard to adapt ourselves to one another, taking a step backwards when one or the other dug in his or her heels, trying to see that which seemed to be a problem in the eyes of the other, striving to see things through the other’s eyes.

It’s not like we were a lucky couple, like our friends thought, it took a lot of teamwork. The early passion physiologically transformed itself into a love we worked to keep alive by being attentive to the other’s needs, without ever letting our guard down. Year after year we worked to construct our relationship with discipline and respect, but not without a hefty dose of fun and laughter.

Did we love one another? Perhaps what we call Love is actually the constant taking care of the other, trying not to get tired of it.

What will Raffaele do when he finds my lifeless body on the bathroom floor? At first he’ll think I passed out, he’ll say my name. He’ll take me by the shoulders and shake me, ever harder, he’ll call my name. Turn me over onto my back and slap me to wake me up, he’ll yell my name.

Tears will start to blur his vision, his breathing will become laboured, then he’ll give in to the evidence and gently whisper my name.

My time is up. It was decided by God, by Destiny, Nature, Bad Luck or simply a Random Case: today it was my turn. I admit I have touched Death a couple of times but did not believe it would come without warning, without suffering some sort of illness or the agony of an accident.

Unlike many other people, I have always kept death in consideration, respected and feared it, I looked it in the eyes avoiding car accidents and domestic disasters by a hair, but I did think of Death, hell yes! 

I felt its breath on my neck when something fell from a balcony and shaved my neck, just missing my shoulder. I never challenged Death, I always drove safely, carefully crossed the street on the pedestrian crossing, avoided junk food, cigarettes and alcohol. 

So why? Why me, why so soon, why not some evil man instead, a rapist or assassin. Why are they allowed to still do harm when I never did and now I am the one who is no longer alive? Those people have no idea how many times they came close to the border beyond which there is nothing! 

I who am guilty of nothing, if not of having argued yesterday with a colleague about a favour she asked of me that I didn’t do. Come to think of it, I could have avoided that futile argument, the unkind gesture I immediately regretted and told myself I would ask forgiveness for by offering her a coffee, but then, today, she didn’t come to work. I would have seen her on Monday, but now I won’t be able to offer her a coffee, nor my excuses. It will be her last memory of me, an argument, a favour denied. If I had known… 

I won’t see the roses bud in my garden as they open up one by one to grace the red stone wall with their beauty, their fragrance wafting through the warm April air. Who will take care of them in my absence?

Not my husband, who can’t tell a real plant from a fake one and once even watered the plastic orchid. Nor Luca, who still now forgets his school books at home and basketball shoes at the gym. Perhaps they’ll let them wilt along with the memory of me: the pain will slowly fade and, with it, my roses, until one day they will be pulled up and my loved ones will forget my face, the sound of my voice. 

Knowing Raffaele, my things will remain where I left them for a while. But in a few years my son will suggest getting rid of some old stuff, those things I accumulated with care and passion and they will end up at the dump, or sold at some flea market. Personal things, souvenirs, dresses, shoes, paintings, prints, jewellery, perfumes, all uselessly collected and loved. 

Only now do I see the futility of those things, their barren worthlessness, the time wasted collecting them, time taken away from caring for those I loved. Superficiality, that’s what they represent. 

I recall when I’d rather go to an antiques shop to buy a lamp for next to the fireplace in the dining room rather than go see my old and ailing mother at the rest home, where playing cards and an incontinent roommate kept her company. The rest home depressed me, but we, her children, put her there because no one wanted her in their home and that was when I fought with my brother and we haven’t spoken since. By putting her there we thought we had a clear conscience, not realising that that immoral act would have haunted us for the rest of our days. 

I wonder if my brother will come to my funeral. Will he cry, now that I can’t see or talk with him, now that my face will no longer remind him of his guilt? What guilt will he throw on me now, how much rancour will he pour over my corpse?

We could have worked it out at mom’s funeral, relieved ourselves of our guilt with puerile excuses, but not even then did we broach the topic. Once the service and formalities were over, we left without even saying goodbye. What a shame! And to think that we were inseparable as kids, we shared snacks, played together and he protected and cared for me like a second father, but then we went our separate ways, thinking, as far as I am concerned, that we would have found the time to clear things up, when the wisdom of age would have finally knocked on my door.

If I had known that what would knock at my door was not the Wisdom of Age, but the Grim Reaper I would not have held a grudge against my brother, it is not worth it, just as now I think that every action taken is useless.

They will, anyway, forget me. The memory of me will last a maximum of two generations, and then nothing, my life on this earth will not be remembered by anyone because I, we, are no one.

We take everything for granted, we think that the beating of our hearts should continue all throughout our lives, without our thinking them, because that is how nature designed it, because that is how it should be. But I promise you that when your heart stops beating you will notice it… and how, and then you’ll feel a strange silence in your chest, the silence of nothing.

The bottle of lotion fell to the ground and in that exact instant I knew it would be the last time I breathed, that I would not have had the chance to be forgotten or leave a good memory of myself. What is done is done, rien ne va plus, and I realised that, subconsciously, I had been waiting for Death all this time and it finally arrived. 

I did have the time to see my face in the mirror and smile at my fate.