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121 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Benefits Department: Do you want life insurance?By the eventual end of this conversation, the Benefits Department informed me that several hundred dollars would be deducted from every pay check to cover these nefarious insurance schemes preying simultaneously on my fear of dying, concern for my family, general risk aversion, and fondness for the mere possibility of large sums of money being transferred to my bank account. I called my husband to discuss my selections. He was aghast.
Me: Yes! Someone should profit from my death. Party at the funeral home!
Benefits Department: Do you want supplement group variable universal life insurance?
Me: I could be worth $2.5 million? Tell my parents! I am a wild success!
Benefits Department: Do you want life insurance for your spouse?
Me: I hadn鈥檛 thought of that. Yes! I will definitely miss the cash flow from my sugar daddy once the arsenic kicks in.
Benefits Department: Do you want life insurance for your child?
Me: What a sick question. Why would I care about cash if my child has just died?
Benefits Department: For the funeral expenses.
Me: Oh, okay. Yes.
Benefits Department: Do you want to enroll in the group short-term disability insurance? Group income insurance? Accidental death and dismemberment insurance? Long term care insurance? Group personal excess liability insurance? Business travel accident insurance?
Me: OMG. I have never felt so fragile. I could die or, at least, lose a limb in a thousand different ways. Did you hear about the guy who was decapitated by the elevator doors? Blood and gore splattered all over the other passengers!
Benefits Department: [Silence]
Me: Everything. Sign me up for everything. After all, I ride at least four elevators a day to work. [Imagine I am really good at mental math here.] That鈥檚 1,040 possibilities each year to lose my mind, literally. Just from elevators!
Benefits Department: [Pause] I need you to confirm 鈥測es鈥� or 鈥渘o鈥� for each type of insurance.
Me: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Benefits Department: Do you want to prepare a health care proxy to instruct your loved ones how to care for you when you are too sick to speak and/or have no control over very important medical decisions about life support or pain treatment?
Me: You are the worst, insurance person. Do you derive twisted pleasure picturing me like that?
Benefits Department: [Smug silence]
Me: Yes. I would like a health care proxy.
Benefits Department: Do you want to sign up for鈥�
Husband: Cassy, this seems excessive. We don鈥檛 need this much coverage. We need some money left over in your pay check to buy food. Or we will indeed die early. Of hunger.Then it hit me. This book. It should not be read while one signs up for insurance. It lingers in the back of the mind. This could happen to me. Or to you. This happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby. Read this. Not during benefits enrollment. But read this.
Me: But what if I die? What if you die? What if the baby dies? What if I鈥檓 paralyzed after a massive stroke in my forties. I cannot move anything except I can blink my left eyelid. While people treat me like I鈥檓 an invisible, vapid vegetable, my mind is as sharp as ever. I could write the most beautiful, poignant memoir packed into a concise 132 pages by blinking that one good eye to select letters when the alphabet is read aloud to me over and over by a very patient soul. What then, husband?
"Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest."