I Died Today

I died today.

I know I am dead. I can see my body lying on the floor. My lips have turned blue and I have not moved for quite some time. If you were to put your finger in front of my nose, you would perceive no vapour of breath.

The phone rings. A landline. It goes to voicemail.

“Hi, Roger, it’s me, Alan. I just want to know what time you think you’d be in today? It’s just, the working day started an hour ago. Call me as soon as possible.”

“End of message,” says a robotic voice.

I shake my head. I have been a very reliable employee at Homez 4 Sale for the last 15 years.  I arrived early and left late. I suppose my worth was only measured as an employee by Alan, my supervisor and owner of the company. So I expect I can’t be surprised that my sudden absence from work would warrant anything further than a polite, irate phone call. 

I can’t leave my body. Not in a sentimental sense, but in a physical one. My essence, if that what you want to call it, is still tethered to my body by a silver cord. 

Dying is not at all how I pictured it. I was expecting bright lights and floating and peace. So far I have experienced none of that. I don’t think I feel anything at all. I am emotionless. Did I feel any emotions when I was alive, I wonder? I can't discern a change in my feelings now from when I was alive, only a few short hours ago. I am, or was, a very even-tempered person. My parents firmly believed in raising me, their only child, to repress emotions. Men do not display feelings. Not in private and most certainly not in public.

The phone rings again

“Rog, it’s Meagan. Alan phoned me to tell me you’re not in today. Should we be worried? I hope not. If I’ve not heard from you in two hours, I am calling the police to do a welfare check. Or I’ll come by. I know where you hide the spare key.”

The robotic voice tells me it is the end of the message again.

Meagan. My ex-wife. My best friend and confidant for the last 37 years. We were high school sweethearts. I love her now as much as the day I first met her. I thought we were happily married. Then suddenly one day, five years ago, she told me she is in love with someone else- Alan. My supervisor.

Nothing I said could persuade her not to leave. She had made up her mind. 

She kept the house and the car and I moved to this flat- a lifeless box. 

I looked around the room. I’m not sure if I could see it or whether I was just so familiar with the layout, that I could perceive it with my mind. I didn’t know the mechanics of death yet. Nor was I really sure I ever would. 

I could see the brown corduroy sofa pushed up against the wall. I didn’t choose it for its aesthetic appeal. In fact, I hated corduroy. But it was cheap at a second-hand furniture shop. A small flat-screen television sat on an upturned milk crate. Alimony meant that extra money was a luxury that had fallen by the wayside. Make do and mend had become a way of life. The walls were barren. Brown shadows remained on the magnolia paint where portraits and posters had once hung, a keepsake left behind by the previous tenants. 

The phone rings again. I hear the mechanical click, as the ring tone switches to voice mail.

“Dad. It’s Miller. Mom and Alan are worried that you haven’t shown up to work. Phone me.”

There was an edge to his voice- not one of concern, but of annoyance. 

Miller. My son. In the early days after the split from Meagan, Miller had been sympathetic toward me. He had seen me as the true victim of injustice in a marriage fallen on hard times. He had tried to reason with his mom in a hamfisted, selfish way with which children reasoned. She had been resolute. Miller had visited me frequently in the year after the divorce, but the visits became less and less frequent as the years went by. 

I started seeing so much of Alan’s personality in him- the competitiveness, the lack of concern for anyone else’s comfort or joy, the humourlessness. 

The phone rings again. Another voice message.

“Rog, its Rob. Meagan wants to know whether you came out with me and were lying face down in a pool of your own vomit in my spare bedroom.” A short contemptuous laugh. “As if, right buddy? Call me.”

Rob was a friend since university days. I use the term friend loosely. Rob was the typical jock in high school. He had gone to university on a full athletic scholarship and squandered it on parties and frequent trysts. He had viewed himself as a virile stallion who could not be tamed. When he had a cancer scare at age 37, he went through a pre-midlife crisis and married Meaghan’s best friend, Debbie, a plump, harrassed woman two years his junior. Once the crisis had passed, so did Rob’s affections for Debbie. She refused to get divorced “again” and they lived together in a marital limbo, where Rob was never questioned about his whereabouts, and Debbie wasn’t limited in the amount of wine she had with supper each evening. 

To say that Rob was prick would be an understatement. He was the whole cactus.

What do I do now? Shouting would be futile. The sum total of everyone who cared about me has made no meaningful effort to ascertain whether I was alright, beyond a pitiful, scornful, or bored voice message. 

Spoiler alert: I am not alright. I died. 

Time passes.

I hear a click in the door as a key is turned in the lock. 

“Hello? Rog? It’s Meagan,” shouts a voice from the door. 

I am sad that it is Meagan that has to find me. This will be her memory of me forever. 

“Oh no! Oh no!” she shouts. She has seen me. She calls for an ambulance while pulling at my bathrobe. 

“My ex-husband...He...He is dead!” she shouts hysterically into the phone. “He’s dead!” The admin of a death call is dealt with, rather ineptly and tediously, by Meagan.

“Oh Rog!” There are tears in her eyes.

She sits down on the sofa, waiting for the ambulance.

***

Heart attack. That is what the coroner is saying. He says it was quick and painless. For all I know, he is right. 

I can’t remember much of my death.

My body, bloated from age and lack of exercise, pasty from death, is loaded into a governmentally issued body bag and dumped on a stretcher.

I am still tethered to my body. I must go too.

I glance one last time at the face of the woman I have loved so many years, wishing to tell her just once more how perfect she is.

I close my eyes and think of the happiest day of my life- the first day of high school

“Hi, I’m Meagan,” says a bubbly dark-haired girl as she sits down in her assigned seat in front of me.

“I’m Roger,” I mumble, dumbstruck.

“Did you know we have the same surname? Hoop? I saw on the seating chart. That’s weird. Maybe we’re sibling!” she says, giggling.

Meagan.