“…the two essential dates.”

Last Monday while folding laundry, the rain battering the windows and the wind howling, I listened to the first bit of The Magpie Murders. Made it to this line: “A simple plaque, silver-plated rather than silver, carried the name of the deceased and the two essential dates.”

…the two essential dates.

I liked that. I turned off the audio and found the passage in the print copy. Wrote it down. This would be a good title for a book, I thought. Someone should write it.

And then, as I turned it over in my mind, I became aware of the darkness at the edges. During these last two years, that second date, my second date, has haunted me.

I couldn’t get back in the mood to continue with Magpie.

Generally, I’ve been restless, unproductive at this turning of the year. The house is untidy. All the tasks are unfinished. The Christmas decorations half packed. Books begun and put aside. It’s been dark.

When my boys were younger, I loved this liminal time between semesters, between Christmas and Epiphany. Lots of snuggle time on the couch with terrible television.

Snuggles and education!

Here’s what we learned back then:

At the end of the world, there will be no shortage of weapons or IKEA candles, but, sorry, no coffee.

Also, take note, ladies. Everyone will have dirty clothes and faces, but the women will still have perfect hair and eyeliner and will find the time to shave under their arms between battles, even when there is no running water or electricity.

And everyone will wear fingerless gloves.

At the end of each show, we’d sit quietly for a moment.

“That was terrible,” my son would whisper.

“It really was,” I’d whisper back.

And in the pause that would follow, we’d each ponder the enormity of the awful. And then one of us would snap out of it, and cheerfully ask:

“One more?”

And then we’d make popcorn and settle in for another.

But. Turns out. Useful or no, the apocalypse is not as fun without a pal. So this year the gloom and loneliness are palpable.

And then, laundry half folded, the mail arrived, and with it, my inheritance money from my dad’s estate. I decided to walk to the bank in the storm, get some exercise, get out of my funk. I mean, I have hiking rain gear, why not use it?

It didn’t work.

Another many days later, I realized. My father’s entire legacy, after making kazillions of dollars as an international airline pilot, was a few thousand dollars for each of his four children, from two of his three failed marriages. No friends. Not a single relationship with any human being. One grocery bag of clothing. Nothing else.

I grieved the loss of my father twenty-five years ago, so I have not felt sadness or absence since his death. But when my siblings start invading my carefully constructed and emotionally safe life with their constant bitter and desperately raging text messages—that piques my anger. And my dismay at the destruction our father left in his narcissistic wake.

The texts began the week before his death, when I was in the throes of a six-week migraine—week after week I had perhaps two or three days free of symptoms. I politely excused myself, and the hundred-and-whatever unread texts are still there. Unread. They stopped a month later.

Then the barrage of texts began again when my brothers’ checks arrived the Saturday prior to mine.

A few months after our father died, my sister went AWOL. So nothing from her. She is the most desperately broken, the child who suffered the most. I worry, but I’m afraid to know what has become of her.

It’s been nearly a week of silence, no texts, but the cloud remains. Is my funk actually a simmering rage? Possibly. I’m the right age for it. Rage, women’s rage, is finally something we are beginning to talk about.

So I’m taking a bit of that money and heading out of town for some sunshine and writing and discernment.

And every day I remind myself that in thirty or forty years when my second essential date is determined, my children will have a legacy far more rich, more beautiful, than a few thousand dollars. They will have me, my presence, memories of snuggle time on the couch.

They will have a lifetime of love.