HAPPY EASTER

Coming Back from the Dead

I was dead a few days ago, for about 24 hours or so.

Now I’m not.

Okay, I’ll explain.

I was here…here being a beautiful town on the west coast of Florida, the place where I spend winters because I’m too old to make it comfortably through those months in (brrr) Maine, which is my real home….when I discovered I was dead. I should explain that although I live, during these months, in this beautiful spot, which is often on lists of BEST PLACES in upscale magazines, I do NOT live in one of the multi-million dollar oceanfront estates that accompany those articles. No lavish splendor here, though it is a comfy dwelling place that looks out on a golf course…and when we look out and see a LARGE alligator, we can call maintenance, who will send alligator-collecting crews who will capture it and take it to a new, more suitable home. Just now I looked through my photos because I had one of a large alligator lounging near the back gate of our community (because yes, this is a, ah, gated community) but I couldn’t find it. You have to take my word for it…it was probably 10-12 feet, and actually the photo makes it look like a plastic pool toy; but believe me, it wasn’t.

It wasn’t, however, the alligator who caused me to be, suddenly, dead. I’m just setting the scene.

I was on a Zoom when my phone rang, and the caller ID told me it was a man in Boston, a man with whom I have a business/financial relationship. So I excused myself from the Zoom, took the call, and it was he…his name is Bob…who told me I was dead. He had just been notified of my death by the Social Security Administration.

I chuckled. Okay, it was a somewhat nervous chuckle. Bob said he would keep trying to investigate further but at the moment he couldn’t get through to the SSA on the phone. I went back to my Zoom, explained that I seemed to be dead, and we all tried hard to find it amusing.

But you know how things that seem vaguely amusing at 3PM—suddenly, when you wake up at 3 AM, don’t seem amusing anymore? That was because before bed I had watched the news on TV. And the news told me that ominously, many thousands of people (the news said immigrants, and I am not an immigrant, though my grandparents were) had been falsely declared DEAD by the SSA.

At 3 AM, thinking about it, because what else does one do at 3 AM but think of distressing things.…usually things like: this two-day-old mosquito bite still itches so it is probably cancer. Or: I don’t think I ever thanked my friend Nancy for the birthday card she sent me in March….I began to worry about my deadness. The news had explained that becoming dead in that way means that you no longer have Medicare, or Social Security payments, and also you may in fact be breaking the law by pretending to be alive and taking advantage of those things, and our government hopes that you will please go back to your country of origin. In fact they will send you there, and even though the Supreme Court says they can’t do that without due process…they are doing it anyway, and so at 3 AM I began to wonder if I should pack a small suitcase and try, quickly, to learn to speak Norwegian. Uff-Da, I said to myself. I used to hear my Norwegian immigrant grandmother say it. Actually I just went to Google for a translation of uff-da, and they suggested: “Oh for gosh sakes” but that is simply the Minnesota translation, the kind of phrase that Garrison Keeler grew up with. I know for a fact that uff-da means more like Holy Shit.)

I lay there wondering if I were on a Trumpian enemies list somewhere. What had I done? Well, a while back…his first term, the end days… I wrote a letter to the NYT after he pardoned a lot of people including the 1/6 insurrectionsts. That letter is still in my computer, and still in the archives of the NYT, where it was published:

Would that letter be enough to put me on the let’s get rid of her list? Let’s declare her dead? At 3 AM it seemed likely.

Anyway: all of that is why, at 3 AM, I decided to do two things in the morning, One, I sent an email to the office of Senator Angus King, of Maine, asking for help in bringing one of his constituents…me…back to life. And two: I would go, as soon as it opened, to the office of the Social Security Administration in Naples, Florida.

It is very easy to find Saks Fifth Avenue in Naples, Florida. Or the restaurant named Cote D’Azur.

But the SSA office? From my house, Google told me, you go two miles south, then three miles east, then past the entrances to the north-south highway, then turn left, then turn left again, into this unmarked winding road, then…no, not there; only employees allowed to enter there…go around to the back of the building…and there, there’s the place where one might enter, but first you will have to walk through the crowd of people holding signs that say DEPORT ELON MUSK, and then, when you get to the door, all of the interior signage is suddenly Spanish, not English, and you are greeted by a uniformed guy (did he have a gun on his hip? I can’t remember. He looked as if he would have a gun. This is Florida. So yes, I think he had a gun) He asked me why I was there, and I said because I am dead and he told me to take a number and a seat, so I did, and my number was four hundred and something, and all around the large room were people sitting silently and holding their numbers.

They looked like people who, if there were a nine-foot alligator lounging in their yard in a not-gated community, they would not have a number called Maintenance to call.

And they looked scared. All of them looked scared.

After a while, still sitting there, I glanced at my phone. There was an email back from someone on Senator King’s staff, offering to help if I would send them the information they needed. And suddenly there was an email from Bob’s office, in Boston. He had finally gotten through to someone who was able to give him information about my alleged death. It had been….wait for it….a mistake. It may take a while, Bob told me, but it would eventually be rectified.

And so I left. Reanimated, resurrected, I went home. I nodded politely to the guard at my gate and re-entered my life. I poured a glass of iced tea and picked up the book I’d been reading—The Spare Room, by Helen Garner—and resumed reading where I’d left off. I’m tempted to say that everything went back to the way it had been before I was dead.

But that isn’t true. What has changed is that I still have that image. Those faces. All of them sitting there, clutching the numbers that will tell them about their own deaths.