He promised me we wouldn’t talk about it again unless we absolutely had to. That was after the last time we talked about it, probably around 10 years ago already. We had been called on by a cemetery salesman. He wanted to sell us our plots. Dear Lord, was Job pissed. The fellow on the phone had told him we had won a $200 savings bond and wanted to drop it off to us and to discuss our future plans with us. When we realized what was really going on, Job got so mad he tore up the savings bond and threw it in the salesman’s face! He said the man was unscrupulous and conniving and needed to get the hell out of his home before he beat him to a pulp, I swear to God I had never seen my Job so heated up. By the time he cooled down, I made us some tea and we started talking about it. Death.

"You know," he said, "most likely I’ll die first, Saffron, because that’s the way it usually goes, the man dies first, so you will need to make arrangements for me, you know." I just about lost it then. I began crying and stuttering and shaking and I told him I wanted to go first, that I could not bear a life without him, just could not bear it. He started to cry then too, and I can probably count on one hand the times I have seen that man cry, it just tore me to pieces. He is not a crying man. He held me on his lap and buried his head in my busom and said he could not live, not even a day, in this world, without me in it. It was just unbearable. We went back and forth, crying about who would hurt more and who couldn’t live without the other more, and then the idea just came. Sort of like it came down on us both at the exact same time and we didn’t even have to come out and say the words, we just hinted at it. We didn’t exactly have to live one without the other, we said. We did, in reality, have some control over the matter.

So the decision was made, right then and there, that when the time came, we would go together. Period. I began to cry again, it just made me too upset to discuss it. It seemed so morbid and macabre. It gave me the willies and shook me up just like it was time, right then and there. So then he promised, we wouldn’t talk about it again until it was time, and as far as I was concerned, there was no need to discuss it any further. It was just the way it was going to be, when the time came. And we wouldn’t discuss it again unless we really, really had to.

Well, the way it’s been looking lately, I’m pretty sure that our time is coming. Things have been changing for Job and I. There’s a stillness to him he never had before. He dreams about the cancer every night and lays awake and says he can feel it spreading throughout his body. Sometimes he cries in his sleep. No tears or anything, but a quaking dreamy cry, that shakes the bed and he sounds just like a little boy. I stroke his arm and he falls into some other dream and seems at peace, for a spell. I dream about being young again, being 16 and putting on my cherry red lipstick and dancing ‘til my feet are cramping and it feels so real. I wake up and I am still here, in this old, run-down body and I am so mad, my heart breaks. I want to fall back into the dream, I try so hard, but it’s already escaped me and I feel so, so sad, for my Job, and for me, and our tired bodies that are turning on us. I know our time is coming. He hasn’t said anything about it, yet, but he doesn’t really have to. After all these years with someone, some things you can just know, without saying anything.

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