Amelia Dornbush

Tenure

Before the End, everyone became very interested in how to die.

There were the Denialists, of course, but their actions are uninteresting because they were wrong. The End did come. (Except for me.)

One of the oddities of the End was that as clear as the science was that it would occur, no one could say with any degree of certainty how it would feel when it happened. Capital stepped in to fill the gap. A movement sprang up to legalize suicide. The legislation passed quickly once it became clear how lucrative Suicidalism would be. Death drugs promised your ideal departure—legalized heroin dens selling overdoses, anesthetics that would put you to sleep with the promise that you would never wake, skydiving adventures with no parachutes beyond a drop off point guaranteed to be high enough for you to die instantly on impact.

A handful of people made a lot of money off the suicide business. Curious, that money still mattered, right up until the moment that it didn’t.

There had apparently been some debate amongst the heads of government about whether to share the news of the End once they learned of it. But one of the scientists who had discovered the End’s arrival publicized the information including its exact date before any decisions had been made.

When asked why, the scientist said that he believed in sharing knowledge as a universal good.

I remember hearing on the news that about 15 percent of the world’s population had killed themselves before the End arrived. As a scholar of the Black Death, I did not find the number as large as Maria did. We joked a lot about the Black Death in the two years or so that we had before the End came. My esoteric career had finally become relevant. For the first time in my life, my lectures on medieval approaches to eschatology were held in a large lecture hall filled with hundreds of students. Previously, that hall had been reserved for Comp Sci 101. The University of Maine granted me tenure.

After the first couple of months of shock and debate and market upheavals, the philosophical questions began to take on an increased urgency as the reality of our situation set in. Government agencies put out guidance on how to prevent the End from impacting your mental health. A reality TV show was piloted where contestants competed for the privilege of spending their Ends on a tropical island. A new genre of essay sprouted online like mint taking over a garden bed. “How to tell your [parents/coworkers/siblings/friends] you’re not spending the End with them.” Its number of permutations was almost as vast as the number of “Here’s how you should spend your End” essays. Op-eds were published: “Why the End made me realize there is no substitute for my relatives”; “Why the End made me appreciate the importance of found families.” As people began sharing their plans with one another, friendships were severed and children became estranged from parents.

It was all of the drama of a wedding and funeral rolled into one on a global scale simultaneously, as Jake put it. Jake was an acquaintance of ours from college who had called to invite us to the massive group anesthesia in San Francisco that he was planning three days prior to the End. We both quickly declined.

He said he understood, but that he wanted this offer of departure to be his final parting contribution to the world. Jake had made a lot of money in tech. He still had to sell his $2.8 million house to finance the event. He had been amazed there continued to be interested buyers out there. “Probably all Denialists.”

After that phone call, Maria and I set a date—the first Saturday of October—to discuss how we wanted to spend our End. We were about six months away and wanted to be deliberate in our approach to answering the question. “Allow plenty of time for your first conversation with your spouse,” read one advice column we both liked by a psychology professor from Minnesota. “And make sure you have enough space for follow up talks if you need to continue your conversation.”

As it turned out, we did not need to. We were already on the same page. Maria and I chose to spend April 4 in the same way we chose to live our lives. Together, in our house in the woods of Maine, holding each other close.

If Maria’s father took the news of our plans for the End hard, she did not tell me. All she shared was that her Dad was spending his End on a cruise with his new wife. As for me, I had no family left to disappoint. Our close friends—our beautiful, gracious, close friends—did not question our decision once. Inevitably, April 4 arrived. As planned, we spent it in our beloved home—an off-the-grid eco-cottage thirty minutes from campus.

Maria and I cooked a three-course meal together: arugula salad, a spring vegetable risotto, and a flan. All of the ingredients for the risotto apart from the grains of rice had been harvested from Maria’s bounteous garden. We were grateful that winter had decided to give way earlier than usual that year. The salad had a little bit too much sherry vinegar in the dressing, but otherwise everything came out as hoped. We shared a long shower. We built a fire and put pinecones on it that made the flames lick blue. We went on a walk at twilight to watch Venus appear in the West. We tucked each other in under an extra pile of blankets after undressing and somehow were able to accidentally fall asleep. We each chose to keep our wedding bands on that night by unspoken agreement.

If there is one thing that I want you to know about me, Dear Reader, it is that I would not choose to spend a moment of our End Day differently if I had to experience it a thousand times.

Maria was smart and accomplished, but, most of all, she was kind. Her laugh made her face go crooked. She abhorred all arts and crafts except for pottery, which she was tolerable at, and photography, which she excelled in. She had a deep, unwavering commitment to rooting for Brentford’s soccer team, despite having no discernable ties to them that I could tell. Maria was proud of the work she did providing care for her patients who chose—and who did not choose—to have children. I would like to believe that this remained true, even in the End. Especially in the End.

Maria and I had met in college. We fell in love over a bunsen burner. I was always worried she would catch her hair on fire, but she never did. During our one year anniversary, I gave her a Polaroid camera that I imagined she would use to take pictures during our date in a wildlife sanctuary. I had talked Jake into letting me borrow his car so that I could drive Maria somewhere outside of Palo Alto quiet enough to hear bird song. The date, and the gift, had been a success.

When we got married, we of course had a wedding photographer. But the photo I treasure the most is the Polaroid Maria took with that same camera. The image was taken while the two of us were stealing a quiet moment after our wedding ceremony. Maria was still in her veil and wearing her shimmering white silk suit. Her hair was braided with lilies. The wedding dress I wore had been altered from my grandmother’s to account for my taller frame, and I wore a deco-style headband wrapped around my short pixie cut. In the photograph, we are holding hands, showing our newly vowed rings and smiling with a fatigued happiness.

We decided to replicate the photo fifteen years later during the night of the End. Our faces are older. Our hair grayer and styled much more simply. Our hands are unmanicured. But we look equally happy, together at the End.

I still have both photos.

I do not wish to dwell on what happens next, but there are some factual points you should know.

The first is that the morning after the End, I woke up just as I had countless other mornings. I felt warm beneath the extra sheet. The sun was out, and its rays were pouring in through our window. I could feel Maria’s presence next to me. I realized that I had dreamed that night of us sleeping next to one another.

In the haze of transitioning into a state of alertness from a dream so close to life, it took me a moment to remember that we were not supposed to be awake at all. Once I realized that we were alive, I rolled over and grinned with a sort of manic euphoria. “The Denialists were right.” I was trying to think of a good joke to make. I wanted to see Maria’s crooked smile and hear her laugh and make love to her secure in the knowledge that we could do so again and again and again for a mercifully unknown number of years to come.

My memories of the moments that follow are fragments.

Realizing that the other side of the bed was cold enough to have been vacated for hours.

Feeling the dusty, dry texture of the ashes that were in the outline of her body.

Hearing the whir of our self-contained solar electrical unit. Not hearing the sound of Maria preparing for the day.

Seeing her wedding band on the bed in the place where her hand had been, close to mine.

If you want to understand grief, Reader, you should know that it rolls in like a tidal wave. That small band of silver drowned me.

At some point later that day, I got it in my head that I needed to find the ten people required for a minyan in order to recite Mourner’s Kaddish for my wife. When I stepped outside, I heard more birds than I ever had before. The air tasted different too.

That’s how I realized the next thing you should know—everyone else was also gone. The Denialists were wrong. The End had come.

After that, I proceeded to eat every slice of bacon Maria had kept in the fridge. God had killed my wife and not even left me a minyan so that I could say Kaddish.  If I had been able to find any other treyf in the house, I would have eaten that as well.

I spent the next year mourning as best I could. During the first seven days, I sat shiva. Throughout the first thirty days, I observed the shloshim. At one point, I tried talking to the house, hoping I would find the experience cathartic. I picked a story I thought it would like, of Maria insisting that she would only install the solar panels on a sunny day. Where the house should have given me a return story about my wife or at least a sympathetic hum, I was instead met with nothing other than the inanimate hollowness of a dwelling whose size had become double the appropriate amount for its number of occupants. That, and the irritating tinniness of my own voice.

I didn’t try to share memories aloud again after that. Instead, I focused on trying to write new prayers—prayers that did not require a minyan or a single sentient being. I continued to look for treyf to eat and cursed God that I could not find any.

It has been estimated that the Black Death killed about 46 percent of England’s population in less than a decade, with similarly high death rates likely occurring in cities across Europe and North Africa. The End’s death rate was 100 percent. I was a statistical anomaly. When rounded to the nearest decimal, my life did not exist.

A day before Maria’s yahrzeit, I drove my solar-charged electric car into town. It was my first time operating the vehicle in a year. I was shocked both by how smoothly it functioned and by how loud it was. I had always thought of the vehicle as being remarkably quiet, before. I resented its ability to work as if nothing had changed.

I drove carefully even though the roads were empty apart from the dandelions that were beginning to colonize the asphalt and the potholes that had formed over the winter. Once I got into town, I parked my car at our synagogue. The lot was half full of abandoned vehicles. I opened the door and walked towards the shul. The synagogue doors were unlocked. I vaguely remembered that they had been hosting a maariv service for the End. Inside the building, all the lights were off. I tried flicking a switch, but of course it didn’t work. Unlike our house, the building had been on the grid. And the grid, like everyone, was gone.

I quickly moved forward, trying to ignore the ash, and grabbed the yahrzeit candle I had come for.

That April 4, I spent my first Anniversary of the End watching the candle slowly burn down. As the flame extinguished itself, I realized that I was no longer a mourner in the eyes of God.

The next day I was faced with the impossible task of deciding what to do next.

First, I tried continuing to work on an article I hadn’t quite published. The journal I submitted it to had sent me a revise-and-resubmit. They must not have reviewed my edits, because I never heard back. I tried to envision what further notes they could have had and took a pass at enacting them. It didn’t work.

Most scholars agree that the Black Death benefited Europe’s economy. Farms emptied and cities flourished. The nobility weakened and the bourgeoisie strengthened. But being a scholar of the Black Death had prepared me to reach the End peacefully, not to survive it. Because, it turns out, what comes after an end matters. Circumstances had rendered my research irrelevant to the present. Whoever the beneficiaries of the conflagration might be, I was not able to congregate with them.

I thought a lot about Noah and his ark that second year. When rounding to the nearest decimal, 100% of humanity had perished during his end too. But my fate felt crueler. In the mornings, I would often hear a chorus of indifferent birds.

I began to wonder if I was now immortal.

On Maria’s second yahrzeit, I decided to drive into town with the intention of visiting places that had been important to her. I started at the fertility clinic where she had worked as a doctor for the past seven years.

When I opened the door, the lights were out just as they had been in the synagogue. This time, I did not bother to try to flip them on. I wandered aimlessly through the clinic, trying to imagine my wife walking the same halls. Where she would have had lunch, what rooms would have held her patients. Anything that could give me a hint of the warmth of a new memory. Instead, after about twenty minutes, I noticed a subtle shimmer of cold. I moved closer to the temperature change and realized it was coming from the room with freezers. They must have been on a self-contained solar unit like our house was.

In a daze, I stepped deeper into the cold and leaned down to open the round top of the freezer. I was immediately hit with a numbing blast. At first, I could see nothing other than chilled waves of what I assumed was nitrogen. Then the mist dissipated. Before me rested the biogenetic material of humanity, seemingly still intact. It dawned on me that it would be possible to spend my years rebirthing our species. My womb transformed into a surrogate for all of the different genetic codes that had been preserved in my wife’s clinic.

Maria and I had for the most part not changed our lives when we learned about the End with one exception—we decided to no longer have a child.

The new humans could study the End as I studied the Black Death and say “it was good.” They could say “it birthed our world.” I would enter into history’s mists, my name added when future generations prayed the Amidah, listed before the names of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.

My face grew cold. I closed the door to the freezer. I left the clinic, and I did not look back.

When I returned home, I began to write. I do not know who you are, Dear Reader, or what you will be. But I know that humanity was able to construct stories from reviewing the bones of the dinosaurs and translate languages we found on clay tablets. And whatever species evolves in humanity’s wake, I hope you find this. I hope you look back on it and seek to understand who we were—our meals, our photographs, our art, and our words. I hope that our histories will provide something meaningful to you and perhaps even elicit a feeling of warmth or a sympathetic hum.

Most of all, I hope that you understand that until and past the End, we loved. That is how Maria and I chose to die. And it is now how I will choose to live.

Very sincerely yours,
Chava Huerta-Baruch

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Amelia Dornbush: I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but now live in Lansing, Michigan where I work as a communications strategist. I write fiction to wrestle with questions that cannot be easily distilled down into an op-ed. When not typing on a keyboard, I can happily be found meandering along trails, rowing on a river, or learning how to make cheese.