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“If my time’s up, so be it!”

This was the facile comment that led me to accidentally share a deeply personal story about my mother while we ate our terrible apricot chicken at that long-ago dinner party.

The man opposite me had been experiencing a health symptom of some sort but was refusing to get it checked out by a doctor. His wife was concerned.

I cannot now recall the symptom. Don’t worry about it. It’s not relevant.

I said I thought it was stupid not to go to the doctor.

I had not spoken much prior to that point and my remark caused a lull. I immediately realized the word “stupid” was too harsh for the lighthearted tone of the discourse.

“Silly” would have been a better choice. It sounded like I cared too much about this man’s health. He wasn’t my husband! I’d only just met him! I worried people might think I was attracted to this man.

I was attracted to him. He was very handsome.

I was embarrassed, so I attempted to explain my strong feelings. I told the truth.

I explained that my mother had always hated doctors. She was squeamish and superstitious, so she willfully ignored the symptoms of the illness that would eventually kill her.

“Fate won’t be fought!” she said, again and again, until I wanted to scream.

In fact, I remember once I did scream, in the car, as I drove to the shops to buy her some ginger beer, which was the only thing her stomach could handle in the last weeks. I remember a child in the back seat of the car stopped next to me at a traffic light, staring in horrified fascination as he watched me silently howl.

She died a week before her sixtieth birthday. It was a preventable death and she chose not to prevent it.

“Well, see, your mother was a determinist,” said the bearded man, and off he went on his lecture about determinism.

“My mother was a fool,” I said after he finished. I was still very angry with my mother at that time of my life. I needed her and missed her very much.

The bearded man remarked that Albert Einstein refused life-saving surgery at the age of seventy-six, the implication being, I assume, that no one would consider Einstein to be a fool.

“I have done my share, it is time to go,” said Einstein. (Apparently.) “I will do it elegantly.”

Everyone was impressed by that anecdote. As I said, we were young. We therefore believed seventy-six was a perfectly acceptable and possibly elegant time to choose to die.

But I do remember wondering how Einstein’s children felt about his decision not to have surgery, if they maybe felt like screaming in the car, if they begged him, “Dad. Please. Have the surgery.”

—

I see from the internet that the attractive man who refused to see a doctor is still alive. His time still isn’t up. His symptom, whatever it was, turned out to mean nothing.

Symptoms often mean nothing because they are not, in fact, symptoms, they are just the normal niggles and quibbles of being alive.

The attractive man still has all his hair and a second, much younger wife, which any woman could have predicted.