Her Only Child

by T.M.R.

At the age of 64, Roger L. left his room for the first time in his life. He was hungry. His mother had not brought him a meal for three days.

He found the 95-year-old woman dead in the basement laundry room. She had gone into cardiac arrest while doing Roger's laundry. Roger delivered his soiled garments directly to the basement laundry room via a special chute built into the wall. The chute had cost $14,000 to install, but Roger had insisted on it. His mother took out several loans against the house to pay for it.

Roger looked at the pile of unwashed laundry next to his mother's body.

"You always find a way to let me down," he said, poking her with his foot. "I'm goin' to the track, baby."

In the kitchen, Roger emptied the cupboard. It took him twelve trips to move the non-perishable items -- mostly cans of Progresso soup -- to his room.

Now set up to survive comfortably for many, many years ... or so Roger believed ... he locked the door and took a nice, long nap.

Three weeks later, he was dying.

As modes of dying go, death by starvation is comparatively easy, and this gave Roger lots of time to review his life without the distraction of pain. His only regret, he discovered, was that he had never met or married Teri Garr.

Shrugging off that single disappointment in an otherwise fulfilling life -- lived on his terms and no one else’s -- Roger L. passed away with a smile on his face and, by coincidence, with his television tuned to an obscure 1989 movie, Out Cold, in which Teri Garr plays a femme fatale. In one scene, she wears a black wig.

"God, she looks hot in a black wig," were Roger's last words.

The circumstances of Roger L.'s death prove ... incontrovertibly ... that our seemingly cold, indifferent universe does, in fact, pay attention to what's on our minds.
,


,