Jan 21, 2009  •  In Personal, Relationships

Morbid Discussions

A couple of days ago I woke up feeling utterly crappy.

I didn’t have a fever (yet) but I felt that undeniable sensation of arghh-what-the-heck-is-my-body-up-to-now.

As the day progressed a fever developed, and my right cheek was beginning to swell. Not noticeably, but enough that the skin stretched tight and shiny across my cheekbone.

Luckily I feel much better now, and the swelling is down. However, that isn’t the point of this entry.

At the height of my illness I glanced over at J. I then realized that while we have been married for 9 months now, we have yet to write our wills.

“Hey,” I succinctly stated, “If I’m ever in a horrible accident where my body is only being kept alive by machines, I want you to pull the plug.”

“What?”

“I’m being serious. I don’t want to be a vegetable dependent on modern technology. I want you to pull the plug.”

Smirking, he replied, “I’ll decide that when the time comes.”

I then asked, “What about you? What would you want me to do if you were in that situation?”

“I’d want you to invent a machine that would keep me frozen until the right technology comes along to revive me.”

“Aish! I’m being serious! What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to invent that machine.”

Obviously J was not being cooperative. But I kept pushing.

“And if I die before you, I’d want you to get remarried.”

“No,” he replied, with a smile on his face.

“C’mon! I am being 100% serious here…I want to you get remarried, okay?”

He laughed once again and turned away.

“…Would you want me to get remarried?”

“No, I would haunt you so that you would never get to meet anyone else.”

Obviously my husband is not ready to have such conversations. However, this is something that should be discussed between a married couple, no?

So I write this in my blog, knowing that this will hold as proof of this conversation and my wishes.

Have you have these morbid conversations with your significant other?

You may also like:

5 Responses to “Morbid Discussions”

  1. Josie says:

    That sound exactly like a conversation hubby and I would have. Every time I try and bring something serious like that up he either makes jokes about it or 100% changes the conversation. Says it’s only going to jinx us if we talk about it. Grr. I think it’s good to be prepared though cuz you never know when God will call you back home.

  2. We haven’t made our wills, but we both agreed that if either of us died, we’d want the other one to feel free to move on and remarry if they wanted. I love my husband too much to think of him sad and alone, so if he met someone else who made him happy, I’d want him to feel okay about that.
    As for the life support . . . I think I am the one who is not ready to have that conversation.

  3. Andrew says:

    I’m not sure about New York law but I don’t think this will be all that useful if say your parents and your husband have a fight over when to pull the plug. Best get a living will and an attorney to look it over. Law school makes a cynic out of you so I would want to get the wills done right at the start just for the piece of mind it would give. And I’d prefer that they they pull the plug instead of having me sit there giving my family a false sense of hope.

  4. Jenna says:

    If you want to hear something really morbid, listen in on the conversations I have with Husband about what I want done with my body.

    You see, I read this fascinating book called "Stiff" by Mary Roach See it on Amazon here.

    The book discusses ways human cadavers have been used as far back as research can tell us. It’s amazing. They’ve been eaten, preserved, all kinds of things, and today they are used for research. I realized after reading this book that I don’t want my body rotting uselessly in a casket. I want it to be used for good.

    So I’ve instructed Husband to donate my body to science. I actually get excited thinking about finding ways to donate my body to the coolest place possible. Like maybe the crime lab place where they wrap your body up in a plastic bag and leave it in a car for 3 weeks, and then they study what happened so that crime labs can better determine time of death.

    And to make this post triply as morbid, if I have a child that dies, I want to donate their body to science as well. Mary visited a lab where they do crash testing to improve the efficiency of seat belts. The researchers revealed that seat belts for kids still aren’t very effective because they don’t have many young bodies to test on. I know not many would believe I would do it, but I really firmly believe that our bodies aren’t any use to us once we are dead (well I’m Christian so I don’t believe they are of any use now) and so I want my death (or the death of my child) to be worth something, you know?

    I think I need to write a blog post of my own about this topic.

  5. Amy says:

    Eek! No, we haven’t talked about these issues yet. I think I’m the squeamish one though, not him. You’re right though, it’s probably time to try to go there, even if it’s waaay out of my comfort zone 🙂

Leave a Reply to Josie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *