NINE

A series of incomplete lists, lists you should complete sometime later, when you have the motivation and energy and fortitude to create and complete lists:

• Reasons to believe marrying you was the best choice your wife could have made rather than one of the great mistakes of her life;

• Means of making penance with your deceased wife who probably would not have died had she never met you, and whose likely willingness to forgive only makes you feel worse;

• Strategies for meeting strangers without seeming too lonely or too desperate or too weird, for presenting yourself as a reasonable person worth knowing and maybe even loving or at least liking a lot;

• Arguments in favor of changing your name and hairstyle and growing unique facial hair and acquiring a new wardrobe and adopting a new identity in another time zone;

• Reasons to continue living even after your wife has died an untimely death and you find yourself suddenly cut adrift like a moon knocked off its orbit;

• Benefits of reconciling with your in-laws with whom you never would have interacted under any other circumstances but who also are understandably heartbroken by your wife’s death, and who have legitimate reasons to be very angry with you right now;

• Rants and complaints you’d probably be better off keeping to yourself, especially when delivery of those rants interferes with other people’s simple pleasures;

• Reasons your parents should still love you and believe in your ability to bounce back despite repeated failures throughout your life at bouncing back;

• Things to look forward to now that everything you had previously looked forward to is invalidated by the absence of your wife, whose presence was integral to those things being things you wanted to do, rather than things you felt like you had to do;

• Reasons to go home and get a job and rejoin the workforce and become a so-called productive member of society and contribute to the local economy and punch the clock every morning at eight and every evening at four and take off every third Friday so you can go to the movies by yourself and then return to your empty home to heat up a frozen meal in a package labeled FAMILY SIZE because it’s easier to have leftovers for a couple days than it is to heat something new every day;

• Reasons not to start drinking heavily—slowly corroding your insides first with plastic-bottle gin and becoming one of those faded men who walk into a liquor store at noon and count out a handful of nickels on the counter in exchange for one can of malt liquor and eventually don’t even die but just disappear;

• Names of people who have worse lives than you and have faced more difficult situations and greater trauma without any safety net, people who you know are abundant, even if sometimes you want to feel like you are the only one;

• Reasons to trust other people, who you have never trusted in the first place and who now you suspect of all kinds of treachery, because the world has revealed itself to you to be truly sinister, has confirmed a lifetime of cynicism and convinced you there is no reason beyond unreason;

• Possible names for still-undiscovered planets and their respective moons, organized in order from most habitable by humans to least habitable;

• Pros and cons of leaping off a bridge, of throwing yourself in front of a moving train, of firing a gun into a crowd until a police sniper takes you out, of self-immolation, of overdosing on Tylenol, of cutting yourself and watching the blood swirl cloudy in the bathtub, of renting a boat and sailing into the heart of a mid-ocean storm, of leaping over the rail into the lion’s den at the zoo, of hiring a hitman to take you out at an unspecified time so you don’t know when it’s coming or how it’s coming, just that it is coming;

• Characteristics of the man you want to become, the man Kait knew you could be and you think you can be if you just figure some things out;

• Reasons to believe—in yourself, in a god, in redemption, in waking up in the morning and feeling better, in the possibility of getting back to normal;

• Things to look forward to in the future.