He came into house a few minutes ago. He’s been outside for the last six hours, fashioning some sort of rain gutter / barrel garden watering thing so he can feed his family when the economy falls apart sometime in the upcoming days.
”I reached out to her, and the lady with the generator will sell it for $225,” he said.
I sort of shrugged, sort of nodded — one of those noncommittally, inconsequential sideways head nod things. ”And?”
”I want to buy it.”
”How will you get the money?”
He exhaled, and I knew immediately what he wanted me to do. Empty the bank account, empty the savings, and let him go shopping.
”I want to get the riffle and ammunition, too,” he added.
I repeated, ”How will you get the money?”
This is where the aggression set in. He shifted in his seat. ”If I have to sell my pistol, I will.”
”Okay, then.”
His explosion was quiet, but it was an explosion nonetheless. ”I feel like I did right before my dad died, like it’s something incredibly important that I need to do and you keep putting me off.”
Earlier this year, his dad got sick, and my husband took an immediate week leave from work to drive four hours away to be there. By immediate, I mean that he got the call around 6:00pm on a Monday night, and he was gone by 6:30pm. He called work sometime on the drive up there to tell them that he wouldn’t be coming in, and he didn’t know when he’d be back.
He made other trips— back up for a day, for a night, for two weeks. This went on for two months until, in early March, he came home from a week trip there on a Sunday night. We both scheduled for Friday off, so we could drive up there together, with the children. On Wednesday night, he got a call. His mom was worried. His father was restless. My husband wanted to leave immediately. I called my father-in-law’s hospice nurses and spoke with them. They assured me that he was fine and he was stable. They felt that he was depressed, and they were putting him on medication to help it. They said that if he didn’t show any signs of improvement, that he had an estimated 1-2 months remaining.
I told my husband to wait. We were going to leave on Friday morning. It was already Thursday. Just give it a few more hours. Finish out the work day like he promised his work he would, and we would go. We could leave Thursday night even.
We were halfway to my in-laws on Friday morning when the call came in. We were too late; my father-in-law had passed away.
(I am pretty sure that my husband will never forgive me for “not allowing” him to be with his father when he passed away.)
”If you want these things bad enough, then sell your pistol or your tool cabinets or whatever of yours you want, and go get them,” I told him. I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t give him the money, but he knew that was what I meant.
My husband got up and stormed out of the room, then out of the house. I followed him after a moment, thinking he might want to talk, but he said nothing, so I came back inside.
”It’s okay,” he wrote via text message. ”I’m worrying over nothing, I’m sure.”
I wrote him back: ”I am fully aware that you and I have two different things in our heads and our hearts right now, and I’m sure that yours is as important to you as mine is to me. If yours is so important that you feel called to go sell or pawn things of yours in order to fund what you need to give you peace, then go for it.”
I truly don’t understand, though. What’s the point in planning to become a survivalist so you can provide for your family if you’re not going to have a family to provide for? What’s the point in planning for anything, if the plan is destroying the purpose?
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