A daily reminder of mortality can be more gift than burden.
Six weeks after we married, my husband got a phone call from his mother, and we rushed to the hospital. His aunt Lona lay in the intensive care unit after a bad headache at breakfast turned out to be a ruptured brain aneurysm, and there was nothing more the doctors could do.
Ten family members gathered around Lona’s bed. The chaplain asked Lona’s daughter, age 17, if there was anything she would like to do for her mother before they disconnected the machine.
“I want to paint her toenails,” she said.
The call went out and a bottle of pink polish materialized.
I watched as my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, new husband and father-in-law each took the tiny bottle of polish and brushed the wand across Lona’s toes. She was only 46. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with my new family as the doctors turned off the machines, the room fell silent, and Lona slipped from our lives.
As a newlywed, I learned how ruptured aneurysms ran in my husband’s family. He was predisposed to have the defect, described by Lona’s doctor as a bulge in a blood vessel of the brain — something resembling a berry on a branch.
He and his siblings and cousins all received a letter from her doctor advising a test. If doctors could detect the presence of an aneurysm early, they could put in a stent to mitigate the risk of a rupture. The fact that my husband suffered from sporadic but debilitating migraines — headaches so severe he would go partially blind and have to lie down in a darkened room — made me worry even more. Migraines are not connected to aneurysms, but I didn’t know this then. Most aneurysms are not hereditary and arise spontaneously, which I did know, so to me, this wasn’t an irrational fear.
His sister, brother and cousins took this letter to their doctor and had the screening done. Their tests came back negative. They did not possess the defect that put them at greater risk of rupture and sudden death.
My husband? He declined the test.
If one of his blood vessels did prove ripe for a rupture, he said he would rather not know. Back then, the tests weren’t always reliable, and he was a healthy 28-year-old man. If they found a bulge, did he really want surgeons messing around in his brain, putting in the stent? No, he did not. Better to live life to the fullest and embrace each moment as if it were the last because we’re all on our way to being dead anyway.
This was not what I wanted to hear, but I couldn’t argue. When I imagined having to undergo a procedure for a defect that may or may not cause a problem, a procedure that involved the organ that made me a human, I understood.
We put the doctor’s letter in a safe place and went on with our lives.
At the time, we were both working at an upscale Italian restaurant. One night during the holiday season, my husband got an ocular migraine at the height of a dinner rush, and my mind went to new places. I wasn’t a person who got migraines, so I had never taken these headaches seriously before, but now that I knew about aneurysms, all I could think, however irrationally, was about him dying suddenly.
I rushed around trying to serve my customers; the bar was packed, and we had a line out the door. The other bartenders took over, shaking martini canisters over their heads, while our manager ushered my husband out from behind the bar.
“Don’t worry, Dar,” he said to me, his shorthand for darling, “I’ll be fine!”
And he was, after several Advil and 20 minutes alone in a back room. But my hands had gone cold, and my insides trembled.
Several nights later, while setting up the dining room with a few other servers, I expressed my fear that my husband would die young. It felt more like a certainty to me that I had to prepare for, but I had no idea how. A waiter friend said, “You have nothing to complain about, Carol. You found your soul mate, the love of your life. The rest of us may never find what you have.”
How did he know? Because it was true: From the moment my husband and I first kissed, I had the feeling that he and I had been trying to reach each other for centuries. That we had lived past lives with arms outstretched, always yearning for the other, but for reasons tragic and outside of our control — war, famine, feuds — we were never able to be together.
This was probably my overly dramatic brain at work — my husband and I were actors when we met — but I couldn’t help it. This lifetime with him felt like a prize at the end of a series of trials where, finally, we got to enjoy married bliss.
But how much time would we get? 10 years? Five? How much was enough?
I took what my friend said to heart and vowed always to be present with this man I loved. If our time together was going to be short, I would enjoy it to the fullest.
But life got busy, and I would forget. Like any married couple, we would fight. But then I would remember. My heart would beat frantically at the thought of living without this man, and I would rush to make amends. It was easier to let go of the petty stuff when I thought about how little time we might have.
I exercised special vigilance over our parting moments. My husband noticed and said, with a laugh, “You never love me more than when I’m walking out the door.”
Each time we would separate, I would say to myself, “What if this is it?” If I was distracted or upset and knew I wouldn’t be able to live with the way we had left things, I would chase after him and make things right, and my husband started doing the same.
After the births of our children, I felt especially vulnerable. I needed his help physically and emotionally. I hadn’t signed up to raise our children alone. Whenever my husband had one of his migraines — and they happened two or three times a year, without warning — it would trigger that fear that the end could come at any time.
As the children got older, his migraines happened less. I marked the years with rushes of gratitude that at least I’d had him with me during that — whatever that was: when the pipes froze and the dog died, when our son threw up in Amsterdam on the brink of a burst appendix, when our daughter drove the family minivan off the road during an ice storm.
One day, on an ordinary afternoon, with the children making noise in the living room, I remember looking at my husband and thinking: If this is it, our last moment together, then it’s all right because we have already had such a rich and full life.
Eventually I reached the point — and I don’t even know when — that I began to appreciate what I had every day instead of realizing it only during moments of panic. To borrow from an exchange in Wendell Berry’s novel, “A Place on Earth”: Death has become part of the way I love — and not just my husband, but everyone important in my life.
Time, for me, carries with it a certain sharpness that I can almost feel on my skin, especially during everyday moments when I’m together with loved ones in a room. I feel a deep appreciation for the knowing glances and touches, the privilege of reaching out and finding someone there.
I don’t know if it’s possible to prepare yourself for death, and I’m finally convinced that recurring migraines and brain aneurysms are not connected. But Lona’s early departure from this earth gave me a gift that I wouldn’t otherwise have had — an enhanced awareness of life. Because of her, I paid more attention to my marriage and to the world on a daily basis.
This past year, our son turned 17. My husband and I celebrated our 24th anniversary at home during the pandemic with a bottle of red wine. I still have that doctor’s letter. It’s rolled up inside the cardboard sleeve from a bottle of Lagavulin imbibed during our wedding. From time to time, I unroll it like an ancient scroll, read it and put it back.
Carol Dunbar lives in the woods of northern Wisconsin. Her debut novel, “The Net Beneath Us,” will be published in September.
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
