Messages from the Dead

Are you waiting in eager anticipation for someone to die? Perhaps there’s someone in your life who might be leaving you a small fortune, but it’s not a person you want to have contact with.  Or it just might be someone that you just simply detest so much that you don’t want to miss the opportunity to attend their funeral, even though it may mean going in disguise because his family hates you just as much, if not more than you hate him. Did I say “him?” I meant to say “him/her.”

You could spend time on the Internet every day searching online obituaries to see if he/she has dropped dead overnight, causing you relentless joy and mirth, or you could just make it easy on yourself and sign up with ObitMessenger.com. All you do is give them your e-mail address and the first and last name (actually last name is all that’s required) of the person you are hoping to see dead, and if there is a match, you wake up to a lovely surprise sitting in your inbox, and you start to make your travel and costume plans for the funeral of your despised one.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not the sweet, charming, generous and comforting person people somehow make me out to be. These traits all get boiled down and confused with introversion. The truth is I am a bitter, spiteful, grudge-holding shrew, even though it is a side of me that rarely shows itself, and actually hasn’t surfaced in over two decades, but I suspect it could once again, once I get a notification from ObitMessenger.com.  Or it could happen before this column is finished. But yes, I am ObitMessenger’s latest free member.  It’s not a very well-known website, and after doing a little bit of research I discovered that it gets less than 300 hits a month from inquiring members, so even though it isn’t well known, it’s doing better than my blog.

But there is this person. We’ll give him/her a fictitious name. Let’s make him male and call him “Blob”, whose death is going to one day make me quite happy.  There won’t be any cash inheritance after his death. I suspect he has little left to divest himself of, and he probably doesn’t even have a will. The benefit I receive is just the joy that he will no longer walk the same planet I do. You see, I spent more than 100 but less than 200 months with “Blob”, months of misery, wasted time, abuse, and unhappiness. I should have left “Blob” three months after I moved in with him, the first time he cheated on me, but I was young and naïve, and he promised he would never do it again. Anyone who has ever lived with a cheater knows they always do it again. And men always cheat if they are 50% sure they can get away with it. But it’s hard to get away with it when they come home with gonorrhea and tell you that you should go get tested for it.

As the older one in the relationship (17 years older in fact), the alleged mature one, this “Blob” was supposed to be the one to take care of us, to be the father figure, the provider. HA! Kids, don’t try this at home. In the end he ended up calling himself an “antique dealer,” which meant he went around to yard sales and bought old plastic toys and tried to sell them off in an overpriced rented building as “Disneyana.”  He did this in a town of less than 5000 people who struggled to keep their heads above water and had no excess funds to spend on the crap they sold at the flea market for 900% less the previous week. He drove us into financial ruin, and when our joint bank account was down to $4000, and that was all the money we had left in the world, I closed the account and opened a new one in my name.  So while I worked a full time job and bred dogs to sell their puppies and wrote porn to make ends meet, he sat around the house and tried to think of million-dollar ideas he could sell to McDonald’s, or he would drive to Massachusetts to try to convince the Paul Revere Museum that he had, in one of his “antique” buying sprees, discovered soldering irons that belonged to Paul Revere. The Paul Revere. True, they did have the word “Revere” stamped on them, but so does the skillet in my kitchen. And a couple of matching saucepans as well. Sadly, he never got that big break that he just knew would make him rich and comfortable for life. And he never figured out who to approach at McDonald’s for the McDeviled Crab. It wasn’t the 19 year old assistant manager of the McDonalds in the small town where he sold his “Disneyana”, that’s for sure.

See? Bitter, spiteful, grudge-holding shrew.

But now, thanks to ObitMessenger.com, I don’t have to worry about missing his death, and I can make a decision as to whether or not I want to go to his funeral, rather than be sad that I missed it.

I doubt that I would go. First, I don’t know if there would even be one. Secondly, it would involve traveling a couple hundred miles, and I don’t really want to make any more financial or time investments in “Blob”. Plus I don’t think I would be very welcome at the funeral. I am sure he has convinced what’s left of his family that I was the bad one. He probably told them I’m the one who came home with gonorrhea, because that’s just the kind of guy “Blob” is. 

On the other hand, it would be kind of fun to dance/pee/spit on his grave while the dirt is still loose on it and his body is still warm. But that would be out of line and beyond my bitter, spiteful, grudge-holding shrew reputation. That is just plain juvenile.

So I will just wait for my e-mail from ObitMessenger. If this grudge-holding shrew has nothing else, he has patience. Lots and lots of patience. Maybe “Blob” has discovered ObitMessenger and has put me on his hit list. But I have the age advantage.

So after I get my confirmation from ObitMessenger of his demise, the next time I am in the town where he’s buried, assuming he’s not scattered at sea, I could stop by and drop off a little plastic piece of “Disneyana” on his grave in memory. A rubber Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse perhaps.

And then pee on it.

 

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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