It’s been a couple weeks since Ben had his kidney stones. As I look back on it today, it makes me laugh and cry at the same time. I took this picture after he gave birth to his stone. We went out for a long, long, long drive with the kids. We stopped for a pee break and they picked these flowers for me. Then they fell asleep and Ben and I talked for hours and hours. It was really wonderful. But back to the story.

Flowers. Beautiful. Alive. Hopeful. Coming up out of dirt, decay, death. Picked. Killed. Dead.

That morning, Ben went in to urgent care because he had thrown up and was in a lot of pain. He didn’t want me to drive him there so I just let him go. I shouldn’t have.

He called me from the bathroom at urgent care and could barely talk. Between groans echoing in the bathroom, he whispered asking me to pick him up. I told him I’d throw the kids in the car right away.

On the way there, he called me again. I couldn’t make out any words and then it sounded like he dropped the phone. I started screaming at the phone telling him to call an ambulance and then the phone went dead. I thought he passed out in the bathroom there and started sobbing as I sped down the road. I was supposed to drop the kids off at Meghan‘s house on the way to the urgent care clinic but I decided every second mattered and skipped going to her house. I called her crying and told her I thought he’d passed out at the urgent care.

When I got there, he came out bent in half and could barely walk to the car. I drove over 90 mph down the freeway and 60 mph in town with Ben writhing and groaning in pain in the seat next to me and all four kids in their carseats. I didn’t plan to stop if a cop tried to pull me over. I figured he could chase me all the way to the ER. On the way, I kept calling Meghan but she wasn’t home anymore so wasn’t answering. I called Jessica and asked her to meet me at the ER because I knew her husband wasn’t working that day and he could watch their kids while she picked my kids up.

We got to the ER, Ben hobbled in bent half over while I met with Jessica in the parking lot and switched cars with her so she could take the three older kids to her house. Meanwhile, Meghan was at the urgent care with all four of her kids banging on the counter asking where we went. They wouldn’t tell her. Stupid confidentiality laws. But we didn’t know that till later.

(I hope she gets a cell phone soon so she can call me when she needs to get a hold of me and she’s not at home. Or if she were in any kind of emergency and wasn’t at home a cell phone would really help her a lot. I keep telling her this. I’ve been telling her for years now. But she still doesn’t have one. Argh.)

We got there and they put Ben in an ER room but it took FOREVER for a doctor to come by. Then he had a CT scan. And still no pain meds. I went out to the hallway over and over asking for them. Ben’s mother showed up. And then to our surprise, our pastor did, too. After over an hour of waiting and writhing in pain, he got the pain meds which took a while to kick in. Then Ben fell asleep.

I have no pictures of any of this because I was waaay too stressed out and scared to remember to take any.

Throughout the morning, on and off, I kept praying, “Oh, God. Please don’t let him die, please, God, don’t let him die.”

We got the test results … aaaaaaand it turned out all that pain was caused by a teeny tiny kidney stone. A teentsy weentsy one. What a relief. No internal organ were exploding or anything. Apparently the ER gets on average 2-3 kidney stone patients per day.

They gave him a prescription for a ton of drugs, told him to take at least a week off work, maybe two, drink lots of beer, and watch TV. Here’s some special math for you.

Ben + muscle relaxants + opiates + beer + TV = Homer Simpson

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of that, either, because I was too exhausted from relief.

Ben went through a LOT of beer. LOT, lot. It was kind of funny. And kind of not. But doctor’s orders. It’s supposed to help pass the stone.

Anyway.

Before we found out it was a kidney stone, I kept thinking, “Cremation? Or burial? Cremation or burial?” And then I’d start crying harder and harder. Because I can’t bear to think of cremation. It’s a picture of hell.

But putting his body underground and leaving him there? The thought was too much to bear. I didn’t know how I could just leave his body there and walk away. I don’t know how people do it. And then his body would rot and get eaten up.

Cremation is a lot cleaner. Easier in some ways, too, because his body would be gone. Though I don’t know how I could let go of the ashes. I think I would sleep with them every night. And the longer I slept with them the harder it would be to let go of them. What are you supposed to do with ashes anyway?

I don’t know. All this scares me.

What I did know for sure was that I was getting his casket at Costco. I knew this because Ben and I watched the first few episodes of Six Feet Under and knew that funeral homes charge thousands and thousands of dollars more than they need to for caskets. And then we were looking at Costco pamphlets and saw they sold caskets for super cheap. Amazon has them, too.

(We quit watching the show because we couldn’t handle all the explicit sex scenes. Especially the homosexual ones. It looked like a really good show, though. It exposed a lot of the underbelly of the funeral home industry.)

If Ben died, I don’t know how I could let him go. Or how I could let one of my babies go.

After Ben’s ER experience this month and Rinah’s ER experience from last year (skull fracture), I realize more and more that I need to prepare myself in case this happens. Death is inevitable. I don’t much care about myself dying as long as I get to see my children grow up. I feel ready to go if I need to. But my husband, children, grandmother, parents, brothers, friends. I am not ready for them to go.

Most of the time, when I think of death, I think of people I’m glad are dead (like Yasser Arafat … or Idi Amin … you get the idea). Or I remember friends who died so young, so suddenly, so recently. I can’t handle it. I don’t know how to. I don’t want to think about it but I know I need to. I just don’t know how to think about it.

I’m glad Ben is not dead.

Also, we need to talk about what we’re going to do if one of us dies. “Hey, honey … ?”