Sort of a Strange Day

In the movies, this would be the scene where the poor schmo hears the rumbling before the avalanche carries him away...

This morning started with a call to the SCCA to schedule my first appointment with palliative care. After a conversation with one of my fellow fight club members last night, I decided it was time. The sales pitch for palliative care focuses on help with the pain and stress of treatment, but it's the part they barely even mention -- the assistance they can provide after treatment fails or is terminated for some other reason -- that I'm actually most interested in. I don't want to be like my neighbor, who was dropped into the hands of a completely new end-of-life provider network three weeks before he died. I want to be like those chess players who know how the game's going to end almost before it starts.

But that doesn't mean it wasn't a weird call to make.

Three hours later I was getting a debrief from my HR colleague on the eleven-dimensional chess that will define my next move. Despite the weirdness, it was actually a pretty great conversation. She did a nice job outlining my options, and now that I've seen the numbers it's really not that difficult a choice. Plus -- plus, plus, plus -- it turns out the official numbers on my short term disability are substantially different than my estimates were, so I've got more time than I thought to figure it all out. But I gotta say, when everything you've seen and read for as long as you can remember seeing and reading tells you that you've got a good twenty years left in your working life, it's a little disorienting to look at a piece of paper that tells you it's probably closer to twenty weeks. 

Oh yeah, the other weird thing: I love it when people say things to me like, "you need to consult with your tax adviser..." Tax adviser? I plug my numbers into TurboTax every year, and pay what it tells me to pay. I don't have a tax adviser. I suppose now I'll need to find one. 

Finally, a few hours after my HR consult, I had another meeting with a rep from corporate headquarters. This one was to talk about succession planning. My employer's been on a multi-year project to make sure the management layers in the food chain have plans in place to make sure the organization continues spinning along if/when a manager decides to leave the organization. They've finally made their way down to my level. It was actually kind of a fun conversation, but I suspect most of the interviews don't start with the interviewee (e.g., me) saying, "It's funny you should ask..."

It occurred to me on the way home that the only thing that would've made today even more absurd would've been if I'd chosen today to call the funeral home in my neighborhood to make plans to have my body collected when the time comes. For some odd reason, despite the fact that I'm actually sort of looking forward to the conversation,* that's a call I just haven't been able to bring myself to make. 

But the strangest part was going from having conversations about, well, getting ready to die to having conversations about what needs to happen at work tomorrow or next week. It was a little bit jarring, to say the least.


* You read stories about how funeral homes push grieving families to spring for all the upgrades when they're purchasing mortuary services. I'm wondering if they'll take the same approach in my situation, and am sort of hoping they do. I picture something like this:

Me: I want you to pick up my body, put it in the cheapest box you've got, cremate it, put the ashes in a Ziploc and give them to my siblings.
Mortuary: But don't you want a nice casket? Mahogany? Silk linings? Brass fittings?
Me: I want you to pick up my body, put it in the cheapest box you've got, cremate it, put the ashes in a Ziploc and give them to my siblings.
Mortuary: But what about a viewing? Don't you want a viewing?
Me: I want you to pick up my body, put it in the cheapest box you've got, cremate it, put the ashes in a Ziploc and give them to my siblings.
Mortuary: How 'bout an urn? Silver? Brass?
Me: I want you to pick up my body, put it in the cheapest box you've got, cremate it, put the ashes in a Ziploc and give them to my siblings.

It would be kind of fun to see how many times I have to repeat myself before they give up. But I'll save that until the need's a bit closer.