The mother of a friend of the Complete and Total Loser's died on an operating table Monday. It was unexpected. True, she was older—in her 70s—and the operation was on her heart, but it wasn't supposed to be life threatening. She was fine the day before and, her daughter told the Loser, only having the procedure now because if she'd waited longer she'd have to have many tests redone.
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| An operating room. |
The Loser texted his friend, the daughter, late in the morning of the operation to ask how things were going and to say he knew how waiting around hospitals was an unpleasant way to spend one's time. She texted back that there had been bleeding and complications and that they were to tell her more in about half an hour.
That was the last he heard that day until a mutual friend called him that afternoon to say she'd heard the patient died.
The mother, whose name was Linda, was one of the rare parent of a friend whom the Loser had thought of as his friend too, even though he only saw her two or three times a year. The Loser had emailed her the afternoon before the operation saying he hoped all would go as well as he was sure it would and that the two of them should go on a long walk together in the coming fall to celebrate their rehabilitation (the Loser had a knee replaced a month ago). She wrote back: "It's a date!"
The Loser has mixed feelings about dying on an operating room table. The pros are that you're asleep and numb and unaware that you're dying. If you can't die while committing an act of heroism, dying in your sleep is the best way to go. The cons are, of course, that you are dead, and you never got the chance to say goodbye to those you love or take in a sunset knowing it will, not may, be your last. You can't even eat breakfast that day.
When no one loves you and you don't really have any good friends, getting ready to be housebound for months is hard.
Although his surgery is a week away, the Complete and Total Loser has stockpiled prodigious amounts of stuff. Over one hundred and twenty bottles of water, lots of butter, bagels he's halved and frozen, six jars of peanut butter to put on those bagels, two dozen rolls of toilet paper, bath soap, aspirin, microwaveable meals, a variety of meats he's wrapped in foil and frozen, two cases of beer. He has much more to buy. Nuts, pickles, tofu, instant coffee, eggs, chicken sausage, juice. Some of this he's waiting until closer to the date so the food won't expire. Fortunately, the Loser is smart enough to know that most foods last well beyond their assigned expiration dates.
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| A gorilla hoarding food. |
But no matter how much he buys the Loser knows that he'll miss something essential. Something dumb like salt. Paper towels. Toothpaste.
Meanwhile, the knee that will be replaced seems to know it and is hurting as much as it can. In a way, this is good. It will keep the Loser from coming up with an excuse to avoid the operation. It's also making him think of a woman he knew over thirty years ago named Marlys.
Marlys lived in the same house in Minneapolis the Loser lived in after college. The house had been divided into efficiency apartments and was inhabited by five people, all well under thirty except for Marlys, who was in, probably, her late fifties, the age the Loser is now. Life had been neither kind nor unkind to Marlys. It just ignored her completely. She'd never married. She made the Loser uncomfortable because she was clearly one of those people who simply never got it, something he at that age hoped wouldn't apply to him forever.
The Loser could hear her snoring through the thin drywall between their apartments in the otherwise solidly constructed house, which had been built to withstand harsh Minnesota winters. (The sound depressed him; he moved his bed away from the wall.) Of the few conversations they had, the one the Loser remembers now is of Marlys having trouble one day getting a taxi to take her back from the supermarket. "I certainly can't walk that far," she told the Loser, her expression one of stupid wonder that anyone could. It was her knee. The Loser, an unwrinkled 23-year-old, listened politely, concealing mild contempt. That store's just five blocks from her. It's a ten minute walk, if even that.
With age and decrepitude comes understanding.
