“Worst Fear” by Craig Kirchner

Worst Fear

          My granddaughter, in the 8th grade, said she needed to ask me a question as part of a school project. What are your three worst fears? My mind jumped immediately to rats. I’m freaked out by rats. Seconds later, I realized that Grandma dying first was my worst fear. For the purpose of the school project and my granddaughter’s peace of mind, I stuck with the rats, heights, etc. — but I am still struck by the dynamic of being alone and the realization that I’ve never been there. I think of the book that Dee put together, explaining to me how to pay the bills, change the filters, and maintain all the appliances. I should have realized that mortality had also become a serious issue with her when we started spending hours filling trash bags inspired by the Swedish Death Cleaning obsession.
Who would I touch, who would touch me, talk to me, care? Fifty years of mind-meld gone. The debacle could be around the next corner, at the next stop sign — she’d be gone in an instant and, during those first moments of grief, the first chapter, there’d be no one to tell my real fears to. The real grief is not having anyone to grieve with. Extending that out past coffee, there’d be no one to tell that you got Wordle in two.
          Turns out, not long after all these grueling epiphanies, the situation is resolved. I go first. First and fast, trying to play golf in 95-degree heat, A-fib says, let’s explode. I was hitting a seven iron on the 10th fairway, and then I wasn’t. I did the tunnel to the bright light thing and then woke up here without a body. It’s not like opening eyes; it’s more like going from a dark coma to acute awareness. In fact, it appears there is no body, just ashes and dust in an urn on a table next to dozens of pictures, flashbacks of family, friends, having hair, and that first car, “Dreamboat.” My wishes had been conveyed for years — cremation, no religious service, no mourning, a gathering, a celebration of sorts. The event is magnificent, as is the vantage point, lounging on the chandelier, gazing at the group below; interestingly, not caring what they’re saying but being amused by some of the better stories.
Hovering here, as the party winds down, there is an increasingly tentative curiosity about what happens when the final attendee leaves, and they lock the doors. When I first woke, there didn’t seem to be any affiliation between this new consciousness and the urn. The privilege to serve as investigative reporter at my wake and the ashes did not seem connected. But now there is this realization that the urn and the table of remembrances are directly below my station here near the ceiling. Maybe there is a permanent association between me and my remains, and, when the urn goes home with Dee, this mindfulness placed carefully on the mantelpiece becomes a guardian angel hovering over her, which could have easily been a last wish. Of course, and this would be disastrous, there is the possibility she puts it in the top of the linen closet with her father’s dust.
A more likely probability is being spread under a large, healthy tree somewhere. That is when the “what’s next?” question would really begin to be answered. Perhaps, at that point, purgatory is over. There is ascension or descension, as it were, or a dissolving into the soil and being osmosed by the xylem of the tree of choice, only to be reincarnated as an acorn and either eaten by a squirrel or turned eventually into a tall oak. It could be, too, that anywhere along the way there is a recall; this cognizance would certainly be easy to find.
There is about an hour to go, and no one has touched the urn or mentioned the ashes except the former priest at the local parish, now married to one of the neighborhood girls. He was like a father, no pun intended, to all the guys through our teen years. He was expressing his curiosity about whether I had requested the cremation, suggesting that burial of the body is the best way “to express faith and hope in the resurrection of the body.” He’s not telling this to Dee but whispering it to his wife. As he continues on with the Church’s viewpoint, I have the terrible realization that if —instead of an urn at home — there is a box planted in Holy Redeemer with my father and grandfather, this awareness could be wafting in the dark damp confines of a mid-priced casket. Would these extra innings be an eternal confinement in dirt, then? A quick recall of the worst fears interview included Dee going first, a savage attack by rats, and being buried alive.
The whole concept of Heaven and Hell never resonated much with me and hasn’t been cleared up just yet, but the locked in a six-feet-under-cognition for as long as one can imagine is a scenario that seems to qualify, as well as any, as the latter.

CRAIG KIRCHNER

Craig Kirchner thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a writing hiatus, he was recently published in Decadent Review, New World Writing, Wild Violet, Ink in Thirds, Last Leaves, Literary Heist, Quail Bell, The Globe Review, Ariel Chart, and Lit Shark and has work forthcoming in Cape Magazine, Flora Fiction, Young Ravens, Chiron Review, and several dozen other journals.

Headshot: the Kirchners

Photo Credit: Staff