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The Day I Died

It would probably go something like this:

Hastings, Holly. 1975–2060. Passed away of chronic liver disease on Friday, December 31, 2060, alone again on New Year’s Eve, since she didn’t have a date, and hadn’t in many, many years. She was 85.

Miss Hastings, was born in Buffalo, the fourth child and only daughter of the late Louise McGillivray Hastings, a bookkeeper, and the late Lawrence Hastings, a schoolteacher, both also of Buffalo.

After completing a three-year degree in Journalism and Professional Writing in slightly more than five years at Erie County College, Miss Hastings took a job at this newspaper, which she believed would be an important stepping stone in her fabulous career as a writer. The single Miss Hastings quickly found her place among the many talentless hacks at the Buffalo Bugle, penning obituaries and taking classified ads for more than fifty years, until her forced retirement in 2052.

During college, Miss Hastings took up social drinking, which eventually evolved into full-blown alcoholism after a string of failed relationships. Due to her inability to write the Great American Novel, or even a Not So Great One, the mateless Miss Hastings never left the Bugle, as she had planned. In fact, she never left the Buffalo-Niagara Region. Hell, during the last five years of her life, she never even left her house!

Miss Hastings leaves behind nobody—not even a cat. The bulk of her meager estate will be divided among her many creditors, and her body will be donated to medical science, unless somebody claims it before noon tomorrow.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, really. I’ve almost certainly—no, make that definitely—come across worse lives, written lamer obits for real, actual people. Haven’t I?

Hmmm…

Okay, so even if I haven’t, technically speaking, there’s no cause for alarm just yet. The whole point of the exercise is to imagine the way things might turn out, you know, if everything stays the same. To see where my life is heading, worst-case scenario. But even if it all comes true, so what? Cats, after all, are pretty crappy compared to dogs, so if ever there were a pet not to have… And let’s not underestimate the ultimate satisfaction of sticking it to the credit-card companies from beyond the grave.

I print my final draft, fold it up until it’s a tiny little square and shove it way down into the bottom of my bag.

Okay, Holly. Back to work. No need to feel sorry for yourself.

Despite the fact that I hardly have a thing to do except sit around and wait for someone to call, I try to keep busy. I hone my pitch for a story about the Buffalo fashion scene (don’t laugh—we can’t all live in New York or London or Paris, no matter how much we might like to, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are oblivious to life’s finer things) and color-code my files until at last the phone rings. Will it be a trumpet seller? A passport found? A grieving relative? My boss, Cy, telling me he finally needs my feature, A.S.A.P?

“Holly Hastings,” I say into the receiver.

“Um, hi.” A woman’s voice. Very shrill. “I want to place an ad. In the personals.”

“All right,” I sigh. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. It’s for the ‘Women Seeking Men’ section.”

Of course it is. “Yup. Go ahead.”

“Will you tell me if you think this is okay?”

“Sure.” Poor thing. I knew she didn’t have a chance, and I hadn’t even heard it yet.

“Okay,” she exhales purposefully. “This is what I have. ‘Cuddly thirty-five-year-old princess seeks knight in shining armor. I love babies, four-star restaurants and international travel. You’re a gorgeous, tall, marriage-minded physician or lawyer, between thirty-three and forty. I’m five foot one, have brown hair and brown eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” I say, taking it down.

“You think?”

“Definitely.”

“Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m doing this!” she shrieks. “I’m so excited! Can you get it in for tomorrow morning? Before tomorrow night, I mean? Can you? I have an extra ticket to The Vagina Monologues at Shea’s!”

“Sure thing.”

“Great!”

I take the details and hang up.

Women Seeking Men. As if. Had she ever taken the time to actually read our little rag, she might have noticed that for every ten women seeking men via the services of the Buffalo Bugle there is only one man seeking woman.

It is all just so sad. Sad and funny. Sad that she dares to believe Dr. Right will call her by tomorrow night to begin with. Funny that she thinks a show about female sexuality and the c-word will make suitable first-date entertainment anyway. And sad again that The Vagina Monologues is not just a theatrical experience, but also a fairly accurate way to describe so many of our sex lives. Because only the rare, the proud, the few can claim to be involved in any coed, long-term, mutually respectful…er…dialogue.

And that’s okay.

Just because it’s sad doesn’t mean it has to ruin your life.

You see, some women wallow in singlehood the way pigs wallow in shit. But that’s just not me. There’s no shortage of far worthier sources of anxiety and self-reproach, like bioterrorism and ozone depletion and flat-chestedness. I also find obvious desperation of any kind profoundly futile, since I know that men—even the most uninformed, unenlightened, uninspired of them—unerringly pick up on that scent a mile away. In theory, therefore, there’s no point in being miserable simply because one happens to be flying solo, while broadcasting your panic at the thought of it will simply ensure that things stay that way.

So even though the prospect of dying alone and poor and completely catless might faze some, I will probably handle it quite well; as a person who’s experienced near-epic singlehood, I don’t even know what it’s like to be in a meaningful relationship, save for one long-term mistake and a few flings here and there, all of which ended in varying degrees of disaster and confusion. Truthfully, it has never really bothered me before. I’ve always trusted that fate will bring me together with the man I’m designed for, some day, some way.

Until now, I suppose.

I reach back down into the bottom of my bag and feel around for the little square of paper. For the first time ever, as I reread my pitiful obituary, twinges of doubt make inroads into the romantic certainty that has served me so well for so long.

What if he never comes? What if he doesn’t exist? What if we never meet, and just pass each other by in the street over and over again until we marry the wrong people, divorce, grow old, get senile and die? More likely still, what if I screw it all up when we finally do find each other, and all that lonely, crazy, catless stuff really, truly happens?

The seeds of self-pity had been sown that morning, when Jill, my roommate, whose life I’d always thought was at least a little bit worse than my own, threw some sympathy my way after she saw Jean-Jean exiting my room.

In the kitchen, she and her everpresent but vaguely mysterious boyfriend exchanged knowing glances across the table as I frantically ripped open a box of Pop-Tarts.

“There’s fresh coffee,” Jill offered. “Hazelnut-vanilla decaf. I just made it.” I could tell that what she really meant was, Holly, you poor, poor thing. What a horrible ordeal you’ve been through. Perhaps a hot beverage might distract you from the memory of it, if only for a few moments.

“No time,” I said, fighting with a silver package. “You’d think there was gold inside these bloody things….”

She looked at me with sad eyes. “You’re so meticulous about everything, Holly. Except what you put in your body.”

“Thanks, Jill. I know.”

The girl is a health fiend. Yoga, soy, supplements—the whole package. How someone can go through life like that is beyond me. The way I see it, we only have five senses, and to squander one of them on the likes of kale and lentils is akin to blinding yourself voluntarily, no matter how much cumin is involved.

Somehow, though, she manages to make me feel like a child every time I order a pizza or sleep in on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong—I love her to pieces. In some ways, Jill Etherington is like the mother I never had. Well, that’s not exactly fair, since I do in fact have a perfectly serviceable mother, albeit one who never really minded if I ate Count Chocula for dinner in front of the TV or skipped phys ed in high school.

To save a few minutes, I decided to eat my Pop-Tart raw. She shook her head as I stuffed the broken pieces into my mouth.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I informed her.

“Why don’t you at least sit down to eat?” she suggested.

“Why don’t you stand up?” I snapped back.

Despite my impatience with her that morning, one of the things I admire most about Jill is how she’s always ready and dressed for work two hours before she has to leave the house. Granted, she goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., but still—being early for anything is an excellent quality I hope one day to have. Maybe it has to do with being excited to get where you’re going—work, date, spinning class, whatever—but since Jill is a clerk at a paper-processing plant, and I know for a fact that she despises her job, that theory couldn’t possibly explain her rise-and-shine attitude.

Not to say that I’m late for things. Actually, I’m often on time, even if it’s just barely. When I have to be somewhere, the digital clocks in my life govern my every move. In the morning, I know precisely how long it takes me to shower, to get dressed, to eat. A mere minute one way or the other might make the difference between panic and calm. I’ll even blow a traffic light to save a few seconds on my way to work.

A therapist of mine (I no longer remember which one, exactly) once suggested that my personal game of Beat the Clock has nothing to do with valuing punctuality, but rather that it’s part of a need to inject drama and adventure into my daily life. While that may be true, I also know that waltzing in past your coworkers twenty minutes after nine makes a bad impression, no matter how late you stay to make up for it, and is definitely not a good way to get ahead.

Lately, though, despite knowing better, I seemed to be having an awful lot of trouble getting to the Bugle on time, and not just on those mornings after the night before. Since it was becoming clear that I was never going to get ahead there no matter how early I showed up, I suppose I was finding it a little hard to stay motivated.

“Don’t be grumpy, sweetie,” Jill said.

“Huh?”

“I said, don’t be grumpy.”

“I’m not grumpy. I’m late,” I mumbled.

Boyfriend, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet until that point, slammed his mug down on the table. “No way! I hope that dupa with the bicycle seat isn’t the father!”

“No, you idiot. Late for work,” I said.

Boyfriend was a bit of a moron, and a lot of an asshole, though Jill chose not to see it. His name, for the record, is not at all important. Although my dear roomie is quite taken with the idea of having a boyfriend in general, she doesn’t seem to care all that much about who fills the position, and is content to overlook all manner of glaring biographical inconsistencies in order to enjoy the perks of coupledom. She hasn’t been single for more than forty-eight hours since junior high, and this latest prize was simply one in a long line of subpar rebound guys who’d morphed into serious boyfriends.

“Seriously,” Jill said. “What’s going on with you and Jean-Jean?”

“Umm, we… I mean he and I were just… I was… I mean, he was…”

She waited patiently for me to finish, but there really wasn’t much I could say in my own defense. It was a rotten, unholy lust whose name I dared not speak for fear of giving it any more power than it already had.

Boyfriend glanced up and offered, “Well, I think you two are perfect for each other.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed, Holly,” Jill added kindly. “Your personal life is your business and I’m sure you have your reasons. And he’s…not so bad, really. So why don’t the two of you consider dating more seriously?”

“Are you joking? I can’t tell…”

“Well, you obviously can’t keep your hands off each other. I suppose you have chemistry or something. What’s so terrible about that? It’s…nice. Embrace it.”

The girl was obviously insane. Served me right, answering an ad for a roommate from the bulletin board in my therapist’s waiting room.

“I don’t want your pity.” I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.

“There, there,” she said, and began stroking my hair.

But Boyfriend would not be deterred. “I think Holly’s hot-hot for Jean-Jean!”

Brilliant.

“Yeah, I think maybe she is,” Jill agreed.

Walking in to work late was definitely better than this. “I think one of you’s extremely jealous and incredibly hot for Jean-Jean, and the other one’s crazy. And I think Jill’s the one who’s crazy.”

“I suppose that makes me jealous,” he deduced.

“Among other things.” I got up and headed for the door. “And if you don’t mind, keep your nose out of my business.”

“She must be on the rag,” he said loudly to Jill, who rolled her eyes and looked at me as if to say, “I know he can be a little insensitive, but at least he’s got a pulse.”

The beauty of my job is that I know, better than almost anyone, how even the most pathetic of existences usually reveal at least some merit when you simmer them down to a mere two hundred and fifty words. Vacuous socialites, crooked politicians, celebrity pornographers and yes, even old maids—all leave their mark in one way or another. Sometimes you just have to read between the lines.

Take the life of John Michael Whitney. Local boy, beloved son and brother, star of his high-school football team—that part was easy. Unfortunately for Johnny, though, his True Defining Moment—most every life has one, subtle or not, and the best obituarists can nose them out like blood-hounds—came a bit later on, when he ran over and killed the mayor of a small town on the Texas-Arkansas border while fleeing the scene of a botched liquor-store robbery in the mid-’80s.

Of course, poor Mrs. Whitney loved her son dearly despite his many vices, and requested that we gloss over the incident in his obituary. “He was so good at football,” she told me plaintively over the phone, “and crafts, too.” Turns out the guy was the Martha Stewart of Death Row, finding solace among his beeswax candles and Christmas wreaths, which he sold to the guards’ wives for cigarette money. But the state wasn’t nearly as impressed, and in the end, not even his God-given talent for macramé was enough to save him from Old Sparky. But I made sure to include it in his final tribute.

It may sound overly forgiving—what of the poor mayor (a bigot and a drunk!) and his grieving widow? (a two-timing tramp!)—but that’s just part of what we obituarists sometimes have to do: rewrite people’s less-than-stellar lives into pleasant little blurbs to help friends and relatives feel all warm and fuzzy about them. It’s the ultimate final makeover, and I believe everyone deserves at least that.

Everyone except me, it seems.

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about my life lately, unless you count the chenille throw I’d taken to huddling beneath on the sofa, emerging only for work and a few hours of drunken weekend abandon, with the occasional booty call from an idiotic bicycle messenger thrown into the mix. If there is merit in there somewhere, damned if I can see it.

The upside of such a mundane existence is that I am left with plenty of time to wonder about the meaning of it all. Where is my life going? Will I ever have a real boyfriend? Do I have a destiny? And if I do, and it turns out to be a shitty one, will it be possible to change it?

Answering these questions has recently become Number One on my priority list, relegating to Number Two for the first time in three years my plan to save up enough money for a set of large but not huge breast implants. The tasteful kind.

As the waves of existential angst wash over me day after day, week after week, month after month, much as they had in high school (minus the haunting Bauhaus soundtrack), it has begun to dawn on me that there might be more to it all than an okay job and a rundown two-bedroom flat over Marg’s Olde-Tyme Medieval Shoppe.

Which brings me back to why I really spent the better part of this morning writing my own obituary and cursing the cats I didn’t have. It’s not as morbid as it seems, actually. Plenty of obituarists while away the hours in between jobs perfecting their own final tributes, as well as those of friends and loved ones, or even, if the mood for vengeance strikes, those of enemies, bosses, ex-lovers and so on.

Of course, I usually while away those very same hours taking classified ads for free puppies and used cars, since I wear many different hats at the Bugle. Many ugly, unflattering hats, including one Get-Me-A-Coffee-Will-Ya-Holly fedora, ungraciously bestowed upon me most mornings by the Life & Style Editor, Virginia Holt. Not that I even work for her, but what can I say—no? I don’t think so. Not if I want her to accept one of my story pitches before the end of time. One day, I hope she and her enormous crocodile Hermès Birkin bag—which I would bet a year’s salary was the only one in the entire city—will be kissing my arse, but until then, my lips are glued to hers.

Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m superstitious, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I wrote my own obit, there would suddenly be occasion to use it, like the second I left the building a giant anvil would fall on my head and pound me into the pavement à la Wile E. Coyote. The same reasoning prevents me from signing the organ-donor spot on the back of my driver’s license, something which I believe is tantamount to suicide. It’s like saying, “Hey! Whoever’s up there—I’m ready! Take me now and feel free to use my parts!”

I explained all this to Dr. Martindale last week after he suggested the exercise as a way to pinpoint the source of my growing anxiety, but he wasn’t buying it.

“Nope. It’s a bad idea,” I told him. “Definitely a bad idea. Hits too close to home.”

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“Ummm, dying?”

“That’s original.”

“I’m in no position to be taunting the gods, Doctor M. No way.”

“It’ll help you learn a little bit about yourself. Writing one’s own obituary is a fantastic impetus for action. I recommend all my patients do it—even the ones who don’t happen to write them for a living.”

“Ha, ha. But seriously…I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to confront my own mortality?”

That sounded good.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But maybe…just maybe…you’re afraid of confronting your own vitality.” He pronounced the last word slowly, as if I needed help figuring out how very witty he was. Utterly spent, he leaned back in his big leather chair and folded his hands triumphantly over his belly.

I squirmed on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing my book any time soon, I thought maybe you could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”

“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”

“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”

He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”

Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.

“Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”

“He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the real thing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”

“I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”

“Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”

“Huh?”

“Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”

Nice. How could I beat that?

“I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”

“Not so much, no.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.

Hmmm…

Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a little worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than the truth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.

I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any real problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.

The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.

I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the antiProzac set.

Despite my misgivings about Martindale’s commitment to the seriousness of my complaints—I had to admit that his obituary exercise sounded a lot more promising than Berenice’s solution (which involved some sort of birth reenactment), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give the obituary thing a shot. There was just too much junk swirling around in my mind, and it seemed like a decent way to start clearing it out.

As I reread the news of my passing, one possible path laid out before me, I have to wonder: What would it take to rewrite this life? Defined by one horrible crime and faced with years of boredom and loneliness and regret on death row, John Michael Whitney clung hopefully to his pine cones and glitter glue. I’m sure, in his own mind, he saw himself not only as a murderer, but as an artist, with something positive to offer the world. But what about me? Is there anything out there to redeem my existence, before it’s too late?

The prospect of emerging from Berenice’s giant plastic womb a brand-new person suddenly sounds a whole lot easier than figuring that out.