An Omaha Public Power guy arrives in his work truck and uniform to pick up a

copy of his mother’s death certificate, and he mentions that his coworker died last week and his service is scheduled here at the funeral home on Saturday. I say how sad it all is—he was young, 57—he got six more years than you, but he’d ended it himself. I don’t tell the power guy that because who knows what he knows. He’s talking about widow-makers and how his sister-in-law tripped on her dog’s leash on her front porch and broke her shoulder and the doctor discovered she was about to have a coronary—divine intervention, he says with wide eyes. I want to mention you, but I don’t because it’ll be a downer. He won’t stop talking about how this loss “really puts things in perspective” and I guess because I work here in the company of the dead he thinks I’m an expert. I want to say it’s random. There’s no plan. But I’ve heard of three people in the last six months tripping on beloved animals, breaking a hip, an arm, and now a shoulder, and I wonder if they’re trying to tell us something. The power guy says he’s going to start working out—for real this time. I nod and give a half-ass smile. I want to mention how you climbed that stair machine at the gym—sweat pouring down your back like it was raining—for hours, how you signed up for the annual Trek Up the Tower at the First National Bank Building—climbing the 40 floors with your coworkers as a team with matching team shirts, how you trained every Tuesday evening and every other weekend with the volunteer fire department and earned volunteer of the year in 2004, but that was when we were married, and I don’t know what you did or didn’t do after we split. Despite reading the accident report, your death certificate, despite knowing what I know, I still don’t understand why you died. I want to tell the power guy that the heart, a ticking explosive nestled in a cage, doesn’t always warn us that we have only ten minutes left like in some MacGyver episode—with his incredible know-how he’s able to diffuse the box in the nick of time—but there may be hope. If we kneel to pet a Labrador, caressing his soft coat, he might just alert like a bomb-sniffing dog informing us that our time is almost done.