Glimpse into the Future

I really love my life! I rise each morning before the rest of my family, work out for about an hour in the basement gym, and then wake everyone so they can start their day. While I’m showering, my wife Alice is making breakfast while encouraging Billy and Jane, our kids, to move faster so they won’t miss the bus. It really is a “Leave It to Beaver” kind of life. My job will never make me rich, but it is fulfilling and an easy commute as well. Yes, I love my life and everything about it except for one thing, the incessant and ever present background noise.

It started as a faint white noise that could be easily ignored. As the days passed the noise increased in volume and I was able to make out distinct sounds: the soft beep-beep of a machine, rubber soled shoes on a tiled floor, vague sounds that seemed like distant conversations. All this is occurring in my subconscious while reality was happening all around me. There were soccer and little league games to attend, parent teacher conferences, and those special times when the kids were visiting friends and it was just Alice and me. It was during one of these special nights when, out of nowhere, Alice said, “I know you’ll be leaving soon but I wish it wasn’t so.” What in the world was she talking about? Then the background noise intensified to the point I could no longer ignore it.

What I originally interpreted as white noise evolved into a heated discussion between a man and a woman. The woman, in the most irritating voice I had ever heard, was complaining that there had been no improvement in over ten months and the maintenance was a drain on her bank account. She wanted them to “pull the plug and be done with it.” The man was, with great restraint, telling her that there had been signs of improvement and it would be a grave mistake to curtail treatment. Finally I had had enough and bellowed in a scratchy voice, “Will you tone it down and take it outside, I have a headache.”

There was a flurry of activity as medical staff rushed into the room and attended to me. The irritating woman slinked out of the room while no one was paying attention. The next day a doctor and another man sat with me. The doctor said I had taken a headfirst fall down a flight of stairs at my house, cracking my skull and becoming comatose. “What stairs,” I replied. “My house is a single story. The cracked skull was the result of my wife hitting me with a heavy candlestick. We were arguing once again about a trip to Cabo that we couldn’t afford. As I walked away she screamed that I was worth more dead than alive and hit me in the head.” The unidentified man in the room stood, identified himself as a police detective, and left the room. My house was his next stop.

About a week passed and I was discharged from the hospital. All my wife Beverly said to me during a brief conversation over a prison phone was, “You’ve never done anything well. You couldn’t even die right!” More time passed and I was waiting in line at a fast food restaurant. Somehow my order had gotten mixed up with a vaguely familiar looking lady in the line next to me. We exchanged orders and introduced ourselves. Her name was Alice.