Today I found a deployment issue I hadn't thought of. For the first four years of our married life, and throughout the first deployment, my husband and I shared one car. Now we have two and he's deployed again. I thought it was a great novelty to drive his car, but I didn't realize how exclusively I was driving it until I went out to get in my car today. Dead battery. I realized it hadn't been driven in about five weeks. Oops. I'll have to do a better job of making sure both cars get driven equally.
So I had to jump one car with the other. That's Homefront Six's area of expertise, not mine.
I am a dufus. I don't even want to tell you how dumb I am about cars and batteries; that little secret will remain between my dad and me. But after I got off the phone with him and realized the proper way to jump a car, I accidentally knocked the positive and negative ends of the jumper cables together and got a nice spark.
That's when the mental gremlins kicked in. All of a sudden, I imagined myself electrocuted to death in my garage. And wondered who would notice.
I had this same thought before a few days ago when I started taking a medicine I'd never taken before. If I dropped dead in my house, how long would it take for someone to figure it out? My husband is gone. I have no kids. I don't even have a job I'd be expected at the next morning. I am friendly with my neighbors, but not so close that they'd notice me missing. My friends and my mom would call and get my answering machine, and maybe they'd call back the next day, but how long would it take for one of them to realize it had been a long time since they'd heard from me? And if so, what would they do? It's not like my mom or AWTM can pop in on me from the Midwest to make sure I'm still breathing.
A friend of mine, her neighbor slipped and died in the shower. It took three days for someone to find her, and it only happened that quickly because another insightful neighbor noticed her newspapers piling up.
I don't even get the paper.
I know, I know, completely morbid thoughts. But I'm sure this is something that single people all over the world have to worry about, not just military spouses on deployment. It just really hit me how isolated I am. No one in my city would notice I was missing.
People on the internet would probably notice first.
There's a blogger out there who goes by the name of Green. LAW and I noticed that she hadn't posted in a while, so we left a comment. Then we sent emails. Neither one of us knew her last name or her phone number, and LAW and I sent emails back and forth, hoping that Green was OK. It was a relief when she finally replied and realized how worried about her we were; she was just busy with Real Life and hadn't been online. But when someone from the internet doesn't show up for a while, it can be a red flag.
Please, if I don't blog or email, someone check on me.
Oh, and when I called my parents to voice my concerns and to give them the phone numbers of two friends in town who could peek in my windows and make sure I'm still kickin', my dad further cemented my dufus-ness by telling me that I can't really die from a spark on a car battery.
Good thing it's not possible to die from worry either. I'd be long dead.
