Premonition

I had last night this unshakable premonition of my wife’s death in a car accident. Seems she is going on a trip today without me, it is not far but would take the day. During the night the thought entered my mind of her death. I imagined how I’d react, who I’d call, what details to describe to the undertaker, where the funeral, the music, could I get my bagpipe friends in La Crosse to come over. What I would say, what we would sing, “Finlandia.” Perhaps “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” “Amazing Grace,” “Annie’s Song,” though unless you have a tenor voice like John Denver it doesn’t work. Instead “Love is All Around,” you know…“I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes”…U-2 I think, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” My wife loves that movie.

It bothers me when people say after something rotten happens they had a premonition it was gonna happen. This connects to another gripe, like when you’re at a funeral and somebody says “it’s God’s will.” Some ministers for want of a better thing to say resort to this; personally I’d rather sit still for the sermon by a priest biting off the heads of nine-year-old roosters than listen to the God’s will explanation. Or that other variation: how it’s all according to “plan.” Twelve billion of us since Genesis in the Great Rift Valley and God wants our loved one. Someone should tell God to go suck an egg.

Premonitions work and exist because we don’t subtract the thousands of times the premonitions were wrong, they are instead a neat encapsulation of our fears. At the fear of losing the people we love, we run the pilot version of the event through our minds. This is probably a healthy thing to do, a method to stay sane with the risks of life where stuff happens. We better fitted if we’ve gone through the procedures mentally a few times. It is thus an act of basic mental health to imagine the worst.

It is these premonitions of the awful that presage our thinking that everything including our lives and fates were planned out beforehand. If this was so, if life is but a designed, prerecorded comic strip, why bother with creation? Which is not to say we can not “envision the future.” During the Carter administration and opening act of OPEC on the American scene, we had a collective premonition of doing something about energy. A tax of a dollar a gallon was one proposal, revitalized mass transit, dense urban design, an American-made world car. Had we acted on that premonition we would not now have an injured economy, a looming world food crisis, or a gut-shot Yankee dollar. Premonition of the future is an instinctive device of humanity. We alter our fates by imaging the consequences whether of something personal or global warming and the retirement of the Boomers.

Which is the good thing about premonitions, to image the future is to buffer the impact, to alter the course, to pay better attention whether to the ones you love or the country you love.

Before she left this morning I told her to drive very carefully and kissed her, twice, just in case.