I Like Imagining My Husband’s Death

It’s good practice

No husbands were harmed in the telling of this story.

I like to think about what would happen if my husband dies. I do this because my husband dying is my worst nightmare, something I’m terrified of but know is inevitable, but the prospect of his death is so utterly paralyzing to me I think about it every day as a way to slowly inoculate myself so I’m ready when the time comes.

I mostly think about him dying suddenly, on a random Tuesday with no warning. He’s riding home from the pub on his bike and falls into traffic. His plane goes down. He’s snowboarding in the backcountry and gets buried in an avalanche. He slips on the ice and hits his head.

No one saw it coming. I just spoke to him yesterday, people would say.

I cycle through the stages of grief. I skip over Shock and Disbelief because I know what they will feel like. Denial and Bargaining play not a part in the imagined death of my husband. I will spend lots of time on Guilt but it’s largely attributed to the act of imagining the death, not the death itself.

Anger is quickest on the scene, appearing when I realize I have no idea how to access our life insurance or bank accounts because he insists on changing the passwords all the time and the passwords are a million random characters long. I used to write them on the back of my journal along with the names of…