Port Mortem - A standalone Thriller Romance

Tilly

The strangest part of all, when death became imminent, was looking around at other people and seeing them as the dying rather than the living.

It was a strange way to cope with my newfound fate, but wasn’t it the ultimate truth?

All of us were dying. Most of us just didn’t know when.

I did.

One year, my doctor had said.

One last year.

There was no treatment. No grand plan to save me from my own body. No experimental drug waiting in the wings, no miraculous surgery, no specialist in Switzerland who might look at my scans and say everyone else had gotten it wrong.

There was just time.

Twelve months of it, if I was lucky, but I was sure there would be some surprise in store for me on that front too. Thirty-eight would be my last call, and somehow in a twisted kind of sense, it was oddly freeing.

Not at first, obviously.

At first, I cried so hard in the hospital parking lot that a woman knocked on my window and asked if I needed help. I remember looking at her, she looked sixty, maybe sixty-five, healthy-looking, holding a reusable grocery bag with a baguette sticking out of it, and thinking, You’re dying too, you know.

Which was, admittedly, not the healthiest response to kindness, but it was a response that helped. I eventually told her I was fine, despite not believing me, she at last left me to my tears, carrying her baguette toward whatever remained of her life.

That was four weeks ago and since then, I had become obsessed with the dying.

The barista who handed me my coffee every morning: dying.

The toddler screaming because his mother wouldn’t let him lick the glass door of the bakery: dying.

My downstairs neighbor, who had apparently decided that seven thirty on a Sunday morning was an acceptable time to vacuum: unfortunately dying much too slowly.

The beautiful woman jogging past my apartment every evening with the kind of ass I’d spent fifteen years trying to achieve: dying.

George Clooney: dying.

My dentist: dying.

Once you started looking at humanity that way, it became almost comforting, because in that way I wasn’t being singled out. I was simply being given the itinerary in advance. The problem with that was that I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. With any of it. How does one spend their final year?

People loved to say things like live every day as if it were your last, which sounded profound until you actually tried applying it. If today were genuinely my last day, I wouldn’t steam my shirt. I wouldn’t answer emails. I certainly wouldn’t spend forty-three minutes on hold with my electricity provider. But if every day for the next year was treated that way, I’d die a hag, bankrupt, and surrounded by unopened mail.

So I needed a better plan and I found it at two fourteen in the morning on a Tuesday, somewhere between Things You Should Do Before You Die and Can Terminally Ill People Go Skydiving?

A sponsored advertisement appeared on my screen, but at first, I thought it was a joke. I mean, it read like a joke…

THE LAST VOYAGE.

Three hundred and sixty-five days. Seven continents. Forty-two countries. See it all before you die. The entire world.

And underneath, in considerably smaller letters:

For travelers living with a terminal diagnosis.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I laughed. A full on belly-laugh, wheezing and holding my stomach. I laughed so hard I had to put my laptop down.

Someone had really made a cruise for dying people? Really? When I was young in my early twenties my best friend and I had found a hack on some cruise website to get student discounts for cruising, and on another to buy a cruise in a different currency. So we had spent quite some time in our early twenties cruising for two hundred freaking dollars, all inclusive. I was familiar with it. And for a while it had been, despite the controversies, one of my favorite means to travel cheap. All meals had been included, and according to my Polarsteps I had seen over thirty countries by the time I turned thirty. To me, it had been worth it, and when I looked at the ad, it took me back to better days, when I was young and dying but didn’t know my end date yet.

I clicked.

The website opened on a photograph of an enormous white ship floating in water so offensively blue it looked artificial. A silver-haired couple stood at the railing with champagne glasses raised toward the sunset. Neither of them looked remotely close to kicking it, but of course, as all of us were, they were dying.

SEE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU LEAVE IT.

“Oh, fuck off,” I whispered with a snort.

Then I scrolled down.