There are some things we aren’t supposed to say aloud–certainly not in polite society and never in any normal mode of discourse. Rather than speak, we keep these thoughts to ourselves and hope that if ignored they might disappear, or better yet, might never have existed at all.

I often–far too often–imagine a life without my wife.

I’ve never done it on purpose and I’ve never enjoyed entertaining the thought, yet the possibility of my wife’s death lingers in my mind like a moon cast shadow.

The thought first arrived while we lay in bed, right before I fell asleep, and in the brief time where the day fully recedes and night takes control, the brunt realization of our mortality burrowed deep into the creases of my brain.

The memory is so vivid I remember it like it’s occurring in present tense: while I become host to this malady, my wife–unaware–scrolls through her social media feed. And it is in this moment, in the comfort of our bedroom and in the quiet of our marriage, that the parasitic thought appears and passes on a whisper of an idea that she might one day die.

“You would be alone,” it seems to say. “There are so many ways that she might die.”

 It doesn’t come as a fully formed statement nor even as mere implication. Instead the nightmare pops into mind as pure emotion; the impact like being submerged in honey buzzing with agitated bees. But just as quickly as it arrives, the tension breaks and I return to the present, soaked in a hint of lingering melancholy and carrying a vision which I hope is nothing more than a fleeting feeling, but which ends up being a permanent presence in our relationship.

In the sleepless reverie that follows, I see my wife taken away abruptly and swiftly. I feel her absence. I know she’s gone.

I see her at a busy intersection where a distracted driver runs a red. I see her suffer a sudden cardiac arrest. I see her die over and over in every possible way, and yet I’m embarrassed to say that at the end of each vision, after she’s gone and I’m all alone, the dream focuses on me.

I’m right at the center of each imagined death. She’s there, but then she’s gone, and when she’s gone, I resolve in such sharp focus that the periphery ceases to exist at all.

In one vision I actually float in hypothetical space, sobbing in a void of infinite nothingness. In this one, my wife is so far out of frame she might as well not exist. In another vision, a doctor tells me that my wife has passed and I crumple to the ground in a wailing moan of dishevelment that follows me for the rest of my imaginary life. I die shortly after I hear the news. There’s melancholic comfort in sharing her fate, but I wish we had just been allowed to live.

My wife is alive. I am too, but the possibility that I might live beyond her life haunts me. The problem with most of my dreams isn’t that my wife dies but that I carry on, and that by living, her death becomes a tragedy. I can’t reconcile the narcissism inherent in such a thought. I want to fight against the very notion, but I know it’s impossible not to be me.

I feel guilty. And the guilt is multiplied by the fact that among all the nightmarish visions that haunt me, I’ve chosen to have a favorite. I feel awful that I’ve discovered positive reinforcement amongst the tragedy of death. Why, when the parasite in my brain whispers, do I redirect it toward a dream in which I find out about my wife’s passing on my commute to work? It’s horrible, but I enjoy the public outbreak and the way my initial feelings of grief, humiliation, and shame turn to the comforting hug of a stranger plucking me from a subway carriage, guiding me out to the platform, and providing me refuge in a sea of indifference. I dream that they become aware. I dream that we share an omniscience–that we have perfect understanding. They blanket me in arms and legs, and warmth and comfort. What have I done to deserve such compassion? Surely, they must have each suffered their own awful tragedy. This must be why they are able to express my deepest sorrow. And because they understand, I’ve fallen in love with them. I’ve fallen in love with a dream–I carry it with me and replay the scene over and over again, praying for resolution, but knowing that true resolution will never come because the visions will never stop. I won’t let them. I’m too in love. I wallow in existential crisis. I keep the dream alive.

It’s my fault, but it’s not entirely my fault. I’ve entertained this tragic reverie far too long, but my wife is also partly to blame: death is always on her mind. As such I’ve long been the recipient of her every fear. She worries about germs and disease. She’s troubled by colon cancer and fungal infections. She’s even scared of unfiltered water and gas stove fumes. However, most of her biggest fears involve sudden and tragic deaths: falls, explosions, and crushes.

Death haunts her and so lives within the space of our relationship. For ten years death has followed us, looming over our marriage, manifesting in its strongest form on Sunday evenings when my wife watches Han Mun Chul’s Black Box Review, a South Korean television program about traffic accidents in which the host appears on an impossibly large screen in front of a celebrity audience. The host, who might as well be the disembodied head of some ghostly apparition, inflicts us with horrifying video of car crash dashcam footage from across South Korea. The celebrity panel of six assorted actors, singers, dancers, and comedians react accordingly, wincing and cringing at each high speed collision. My wife watches this show with grave concern.

The first Sunday that we watched Black Box Review together, my wife gasped in horror when a pedestrian was mangled by a piece of heavy machinery careening down a roadway. Though the moment of impact was censored, the reality of it was clear. It was awful, and yet my wife looked straight ahead, absorbing it all.

And then, when the dust had settled and the narration neared its end, my wife turned to me and said, “Life is too short. Isn’t it tragic that we can be taken away in an instant. And without warning at that. Could you imagine someone you love crushed under the wheels of a concrete mixer?”

I imagined it. And I agreed; it would be deeply unsettling. I didn’t have the words; what I had was worse: I had the image.

After that, each time we watched the show, I couldn’t help but see her in each of the subsequent clips. I saw my wife run over by a driver too busy sending a text to notice that the light had changed. In the next scene I saw her car get rear ended on the highway by an eager driver darting back and forth between lanes on his evening commute. The high speed collision in the next scene sent my wife’s car into the median where it bounced off a railing and swerved back into traffic. The lights of an oncoming SUV illuminated the coming tragedy. It was awful–truly awful. And every last minute of it fed the nightmare that burrowed into my brain.

I know my wife has the same haunted conscience l have. I know she thinks about me in like-manner. On a lovely evening walk last week, she told me that she wouldn’t know what to do if the construction abutting the main road toppled over and sent a crane hurtling toward my car.

“You wouldn’t even be here anymore. I wouldn’t even be able to hold your hand,” she said, shedding a tear when she vocalized it, as if the pronouncement made the vision somehow more real, or as though she might have the power to dream a world of sorrow and agony into existence.

Despite it all, I pretend not to have the same thoughts. I tell her not to worry and remind her that the nature of such accidents is improbable and that I might be involved highly unlikely. But all I can say to sooth her is “I love you. It’s OK. I’m here now.”

I don’t know why I don’t tell her that I worry too. Maybe I also believe that stating a fear might manifest an awful, terrible fate. I know such things aren’t impossible. I know it happens to someone. I see it on TV.

My mind runs amok. I consider all the possible ways she might go: pushed down a flight of stairs by a stranger, or just a careless step that sends her stumbling. When her projected death turns to my selfish sorrow, I again imagined the comfort offered by the strangers on the subway platform. It’s winter in my dreamworld, and the warmth of their coats smothers the worst of me out onto the pavement and replaces it with relief. There’s even a smidge of gratitude in it. I grab it and hold on.

I’ve now thought of these commuters so many times that they carry the weight of memory. They’re so real that I feel stuck between worlds; as though life itself is a place I can’t escape, and yet I know the nightmare isn’t real. I know she’s lying next to me. I see that she’s alive and healthy, but I know that life is precarious, especially this one which contains all of our love. That we could lose it is paralyzing. We live in fear because we love one another.

The thought that we love each other–the knowledge of our bond–feeds the parasitic nightmare growing within my mind; it wriggles deeper and deeper and deeper. It drives me toward my fears. To satiate it I read obituaries. I dream about their significant others and find comfort in their loss. I inhabit their bodies. I attend their funerals. I am the husband or wife of the deceased.

I read about a heart surgeon run over by a heavy truck laden with I-beams. As I read, my wife becomes her. In the next paragraph, the truck obliterates the bicycle she had been riding to work. One of her colleagues at the hospital is quoted, stating that “She had been riding her bike to work to improve her cardiac health.”

A day later, I read about a stage actress in her mid 30’s. After years of toil, she has finally caught a taste of fame, and on the verge of becoming well-known, right as she started to earn the respect of critics and colleagues, she slipped and fell and hit her head. She was found early the next morning. I imagine what I would feel if she had been my wife.

 I love my wife. We are madly in love with one another–in love enough to share a dream of our mortality. We also love the world. We love it because it’s composed of people like us. We care about them. We see them hit by cars on TV and die in online obituaries. We see that each of us (you and I and they) carry around the memory of a tragedy–real or imagined–through every moment of our lives. We see that we are all the same and that we need love and comfort.

And I remember that my wife was once a stranger. Before we met, we were invisible to one another, but ever since we fell in love we have come to inhabit the same world. Now we are so close it’s nearly impossible to imagine separate lives. And even if I imagine that I had never met her, I still know things about her. For instance, I know that I would be able to pick her out of a crowd as someone deserving of all my love, and I’m sure that if she had been a faceless commuter standing next to me, day in and day out as I read a book on my way to work, she would have been the sort of person to offer comfort and compassion to a stranger in need, even if that stranger were me.

About Daniel Speechly

Daniel Speechly is the Academic Manager at a private language institute in Seoul, South Korea where he teaches reading and writing to young adults. In his free time he runs NFEscapism.com, a nonfiction book review blog created to help others fall in love with some of his favorite books. His most recent publications appear in Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, The Corvus Review, and The Inquisitive Eater.

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