My one

It was around the start of Lent, and after about a week of being passed out in the hospital, when a very dear homie of mine finally came to. It was like this really intense, can’t-seem-to-wake-up-fully-from-his-fucking-life-threatening nap more than any kind of “coma.” “He can’t fully wake up,” a sister’s update-text read.

What I do know is that Richie has a-flutter, that he’s landed in the hospital a few times as a result of this asshole, had a more recent and aggressive surgery to take care of the problem once and for all, but soon afterwards landed in the hospital on a 24×7 ventilator. Asleep every minute of the day. Fluid in his heart. Coming to for a sec or two to ask, “Where’s my wife. You’re not my wife. Yeah, you’re my wife.” Then back to sleep. Of course making all of us grade school homies wonder to ourselves: Is he the first? Is Richie gonna be the first?

Where’s my wife?

I’m almost 54. I’m in the second half of my life. Only a few minutes into the 3rd quarter, I hope. It also means I get to think about dying a lot more. Sometimes I think about going quietly in my sleep with a family at my bedside, a busty and fragrant and scantily-clad team throttling away my discomfort and feathering out my oxygen with the corresponding valves, or however that hospice shit’s done.

In other musings, I get a case of the irreversible cancer, and rather than be a pain in everyone’s ass who’s around me, I just drive off a cliff.

In a more vainglorious scenario, I die protecting an acre of ocean from shark finning or illegal driftnets. Years ago, I was a dumb-ass Sea Shepherd. It’s where my adult life on the water began. That urge to champion our oceans violently, however, still breathes inside me. So much so, I just recently googled my old captain and founder of the Sea Shepherds to see if he’s still alive. He is. And it looks like he’s not quite done being a dumb ass, either.

Still, in all of these instances, a question looms for a single guy like me: where’s my wife? It’s a question that Richie’s recent hospitalization brought me to ask myself, since his wife was the first to pop in his head the moment he came to, not his three terrific kids.

I don’t think I quite mean it in the literal sense. I’ve been around a fair number of marriages, including my own years ago, and none of them exactly make me anxious to jump back in. They’re work. Richie’s is work. He said so himself. I don’t want to work. I’ve got plenty of work to do outside the home. And if I’m being one hundred and ten percent honest about it, I do enjoys me some strange in the bedroom.

Still, and Steve Harvey said it best in front of an audience full of women: a guy like me could and will change my ways and my habits and my thinking for the one. “And if he ain’t changed, ladies, you ain’t the one.’

The one.

The only one who King Leonidas (movie 300) looks up to in the sky right before the arrows are about to staple his body to the dirt, and wails to: “My queen! . . . my wife! . . . my love!”

The one who I’m gonna call on the second or two I come to before maybe crapping out again.

My queen, who’s going to ask the medical team, Hey dumbasses, did you check my king for a stroke?

Yes, one of my best homies of all time, Richie, did suffer a mild stroke on top of all the other bullshit. Thanks to his queen who pressed and pressed and pressed for it.

I’ll finish by telling you this pastor in Alaska uttered this harsh-sounding proclamation in a homily when my then wife and I were still childless: “Your children are not the most important thing in the world to you. Your wife is.”

Holy shit.

For now, though, and by default, my son is the only love I have. He’s going to leave the same way I did one day, and I don’t get to be butt-hurt when he does. It’s what a man does. But hopefully I will have found her by then. My wife. My queen. My one.

My home.

-Neal