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This Is How I Want To Die
And this is how I want to live
I had hidden 100 Easter eggs and cooked a ham when I got the text. “Call me when you can. I’ve got bad news.”
I also had three missed calls, which kicked my imagination into overdrive. My brother’s son just had a baby, so I wondered if something had gone wrong. Or maybe my cousin’s husband with COPD and a litany of other ailments died? But there was also the other cousin, who survived a bout of cancer and now suffered from back pain.
The bad news could be anything.
Reluctantly, dreading what I might hear, I called my sister.
“Lynda just died,” she blurted, her disbelief echoing my own. Riffling through my list of fragile relatives, Lynda would have been the one voted least likely to die.
She was nine years younger than my uncle, her husband. The two of them traveled the globe together, and when they weren’t traveling, she was commemorating some occasion or other with friends. We teased her about celebrating her birthday for an entire month, her Facebook postings documenting her festivities.
She was a feisty, tiny woman with an oversized smile, a penchant for socializing, and a love of eating in good restaurants.
