The first sign that the Grim Reaper is looking for you is the Buick, a 1974 LeSabre, the color of weak tea, that has been sitting across the street for three nights with the lights off and the engine running. Nobody on your block has owned a Buick since the Carter administration. The neighbors figure it is a process server, or a Jehovah’s Witness who has lost the will to knock. You know better. The muffler sounds like a man clearing his throat before he delivers bad news.
The second sign is the mail. You start getting things addressed in a handwriting nobody uses anymore. AARP skips the renewal notice and offers you the “lifetime” membership, which is either generous or an estimate. A cemetery sends a glossy brochure with early-bird pricing and a photo of a plot “with afternoon shade.” A furniture catalog arrives featuring a recliner whose last position is labeled “permanent.”
Your insurance agent calls just to chat. In forty years your insurance agent has never called just to chat. Then strangers start being kind. Teenagers give you their seats on the bus. A waitress calls you “hon” in a voice usually saved for injured birds. The young man at the bank stops trying to sell you a thirty-year CD.
So you do what any sensible person does. You go to the doctor, get your blood drawn, and take some pills. That night the Buick idles out front for an hour. Through the curtain you watch a long bony finger run down a clipboard, stop, and tap twice. Then he puts the car in gear and drives off, wrong way down a one-way street, headed vaguely toward Delaware.
The Grim Reaper is not a good driver. Eternity has made him careless about turn signals. Twice this week you have seen him pull into a Wawa, buy a coffee he does not drink, and sit in the lot squinting at a paper map. He will not use GPS. He points out that he was finding people before there were roads. He found Methuselah. Admittedly that took a while.
He will be back. He always comes back, though the Buick burns oil, the map is from 1962, and he still cannot find the bypass.
Read more life-changing dispatches from a culture officially in decline by clicking here.
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