My wife Irene

There I was.  I think it was a Sunday, and for some reason I don’t remember, I had skipped church.  Instead, I took the time to be spontaneous and leave town for the weekend.  Being spontaneous was something I haven’t done in a long time–not since I was left to raise my two children alone.  Yeah, I’m a single dad; it seems popular these days.  But I didn’t lose my wife in a divorce or annulment.  I lost her in a plane crash 15 years ago.  She was flying to California to visit her family for the holidays, and the next thing I knew, she was gone.

Her plane crashed somewhere in the Pacific, and her body was never recovered.  Some nights I have nightmares where I see her in the ocean, her eyes  wide open but blank.  Her skin wrinkled from being in the water too long.  15 years too long.  God! She’s been down there in that wet grave for 15 long years.  

The Christmas of that year was the loneliest Christmases I’ve ever had.  And it pains me so much to remember the look of young Edmund’s face while he was waiting for Christmas eve to turn into Christmas morn.  He said he asked Santa for only one thing, “to bring back mommy,” and he was waiting for her to magically appear under the Christmas tree.  A child should never go through such a horror.

As for Madeleine, she was too young to know what death meant.

So I sat on a plane, and remarkably wasn’t afraid of crashing–but I looked down through the window and wished that we would.  Wished my life would end so I could be with my sweet Irene.  Anyway my kids don’t need me: Edmund has his own family now; and Madeleine’s gone off to college.

(If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody could hear it, does it make a sound?)  

On that plane, seated beside a fat man who forgot to put on his deodorant this morning, I felt very small.  That if I disappeared from the face of this earth, nobody would really mind.  Old men die everyday, no great loss.