Pretending I'm Retired

Preparing “I just finished reading a book about all the ways you can die in the Grand Canyon,” my neighbor tells me as we watch our dogs run around his back yard. I cross my arms and stare at him. “Great,” I say, rolling my eyes. “This is just what I want to hear the night before I leave for the Grand Canyon.” He laughs. “No, you’d like it, really,” he says. “The point is, the majority of these deaths are preventable if you are prepared.” I’m prepared. Chrissy and I have been preparing for over a year, in fact, because that’s how far in advance this adventure has been on the calendar. After entering a lottery, we were notified in March of 2022 that we secured two spots to spend the night in a cabin at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Did you know that the Grand Canyon hosts about 6 million visitors annually? This makes it our second most popular National Park, just behind the Great Smoky Mountains. And of that 6 million, guess how many people take at least one step below the

Somehow, I thought death would be more profound. Sad, of course, but also a meaningful and poetic intersection of grief and joy. Memories of a life well spent. A reminder to the living that time is our most precious commodity. What I didn’t expect was the mundane side of death. The phone calls. The emails. The paperwork. The taxes. Death has become my “to do” list. I think back to a year ago when I was feeling the itch for a change. A new dog? A new job? Go back to school? And in true Allison fashion, I did all three. I adopted an adorable puppy, I accepted a job teaching fifth grade at a new school, and I enrolled in a creative writing program. I filled my life right up to the brim. What I didn’t allow for was space for the unexpected. Which is a naïve error in calculations, right? Because when has life ever gone according to my well laid-out plans? When my dad died in July, I thought, “I can handle this.” I’ve learned a lot over the last 8 months as I’ve navigated the tasks associa