You read that right.  No point wasting time rereading it.  I think that of all the possible scenarios this is my favorite.  Can you imagine walking down the street or even in the mall, packed full of hundred of people, and then just… POOF? 

I could be having a nice dinner with my husband, discussing important life changing events and then just burst.  Would anyone in McDonalds notice? Would Chris be able to recount the event in therapy for years to come, or WORSE, would he ever be able to eat a Quarter Pounder with Cheese again?

“What if” I combust while sitting in the principal’s office, dealing with my son’s discipline problems, while Mr. Anderson turns to reread the number of days my son has been in the Responsible Thinking Center.  The look of disgust on his face as he sees the number 59, he then turns back to a pile of ash delicately blobbed in the seat that use to contain… me.  I am sure at that moment he would realize where all these problems originated.  I mean, how rude to just combust in the middle of a conference.  

A scary thought would to spontaneously combust while sitting in traffic with kids in tow.  Would the car careen out of control off a bridge plummeting the whole Armstrong clan to their untimely end?  Who would live to tell the tale? 

“Mom just exploded… wasn’t me!”

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Back in the fall of ‘98 I had some bad luck with my health and was hospitalized with gallstones which lead to pancreatitis and extraction.  A week to the date of the removal of my gall bladder, I totaled my mother’s car.  I was driving to my grandmother’s house (about a 2 hour drive) to see my son who I had seen very little of the previous month.  It was during finals in college and I didn’t want to wait until the Monday after my last test to see him.  The plan: I was going to drive down for the day and see him, drive back to finish my last test, and then my friend Mary was going to take me back to Lawton where I would stay until my mother came down for Christmas.  I rolled my mother’s car with the cruise set at 70 mph.  I hit no one and stopped right side up in a very grassy median.  Since that accident, I have had quite a bit of anxiety on the road.  I had managed to wreck a car on the flattest of surfaces in perfect weather, so it’s easy to see chaos almost everywhere.

I consider myself a very positive person, but in the back of my mind I am always trying to avoid a possible calamity.  Walking down the stairs I imagine tumbling with child in hand, or even alone.  Who would find me?  Where would my kids be?  Who would pick them up from school?  Who would call for help?  Would Brynn run into the road, or would someone take her?  So I guess there’s this dark “what if” always in the back of my mind.

SO…

I thought it might be cool to blog these out.  Turn something that actually causes me quite a bit of distress into something more… I don’t know… humorous.  There are several sites out there where people bet on the death of others, kind of sick in a way, but some are incredibly ridiculous and quite funny… so I am going to term these incidents, which I hope to write about weekly, “My Death Pool” Series.  Although not all situations could possibly end in death, still lies the question: “what if?”  There are also sites out there where you can reserve to write obituaries for certain people…. so reserve mine today!

A thought crossed my mind in the shower yesterday as I was contemplating my building layout: how structurally sound is my apartment building? “What if” while showering on the third floor, in the bathroom off the master suite, those extra pounds that I have put on since our move to AZ were the straw that broke the camels back.  Maybe those small cracks in the grout around my shower had allowed just enough water to weaken the skeletal system that holds my tub in place.  Imagine soaked and soapy plummeting to your death, to be found naked and covered in suds in the bathroom of your neighbor.  They would have to call in extra emergency service workers because I would be too slippery for the two-man job.

Maybe 10 feet wouldn’t kill me, but falling from the heavens all “nekkid” and bubbly while Bob OR Sheila sat quietly on the toilet reading their morning paper… would be worse than death.  The only thing I could imagine that would be worse would be to actually keel over whilst on the pot.  I can see it now, the emergency service workers trying to pry my Nintendo DS out of my clutched hands, as my alter ego stared on, tapping her foot in front of Nook’s shop.

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