Negotiating the End of Us

He always told me he was going to die young. We used to argue about it. I realize now how comical that sounds. Not the dying part, obviously — just the arguing about it.

“What do you mean by young?” I would say. “Define young!”

The most recent time we had this conversation, Jimmy tried to come across casually, as though we were discussing the weather: “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe 60?”

“Sixty?” I shrieked. And then the bargaining commenced, as he attempted to calm me down by tossing out what he surmised might be a more palatable number.

“OK, 65,” he said.

“Five more years?” I said. “You’re giving me five more years? We have cottage cheese in our refrigerator older than that.”

The faster I circled the drain, the more conciliatory he became. “How am I supposed to know?” he said. “It’s not like I have a crystal ball!”

“Well, I mean, it sounds like you have a crystal ball,” I said. “You’re the one that brought this up, after all!”

And with that elusive upper-hand, I continued haggling: “I could maybe agree to 75, but that’s as low as I can go.”

We bandied hypothetical ages back and forth as if this was an exercise in arbitration, a minor marital tiff, like whether we would have Thai for dinner.

These conversations never failed to trigger me. I had built my world around him, and he was proffering some casual heads-up that he may be dismantling it way sooner than planned. As futile as it was, we continued to negotiate on a number with which we could both live.

Or one I could live with, and Jimmy could die with, I suppose.

And it’s not as though he wanted to die. Of this I’m certain. We’ve buried years upon years of memories, one atop the other, like sacred marital catacombs, layered along the way. I meander around through these cherished vignettes whenever I need to reassure myself.

One of those cherished memories was when we both turned 50 and our friends threw us a celebratory bash in our own home. Later that evening, after kicking everyone out, we stood together at the sink, washing wine glasses, trading snippets of hilarity from the evening and enjoying our mutual playlist.

When one of my songs, Phil Collins’ “A Groovy Kind of Love,” started playing, he took the dish towel from my hand and led me out to our makeshift dance floor between our island and kitchen table. But it wasn’t the memory of kitchen dancing that seared into my brain; it was when I looked up to see tears streaming down his face.

It seems we had entered our last decade together, and he had started to mourn the loss of us.

A few years later, I was lounging on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, scrolling mindlessly through social media, when the doorbell rang. I’m not sure how I didn’t hear it. I was much closer to the front door than our youngest son, Tommy. But regrettably, he heard the doorbell first.

When Tommy walked into the den and said, “Mom, there’s a police officer at the door holding Dad’s cellphone and wallet,” all I remember thinking was, “Here it is. Just like he said. Here is the end of us.”

The officer told me Jimmy was killed by a distracted driver. He was 54. It took a few weeks for it to hit me. Why hadn’t I accepted his generous offer of 65 back when I had the chance? I never was adept at bargaining.

Many years earlier, we were carefree college students. He was an intense and ambitious business major, and I was dabbling in the humanities. My philosophy professor assigned our class what I naïvely thought was the most difficult assignment ever given. We were to write a paper that juxtaposed the concept of predestination against the concept of human free will.

I spent days constructing my argument in my mind before I put pen to paper. Part of my creative writing process involved whining to him about it: “How do I juxtapose two concepts that are so diametrically opposed?”

He laughed and said, “Just BS your way through it. You’ll do fine!”

I suppose that’s what I did, but to this day I can’t remember a word I wrote, just that I got an “A.” Nonetheless, the mental rigor of that assignment never really left my consciousness. The time for me to write that paper was after he died, when the creative floodgates opened leading me to ponder how much control we actually have over life’s outcomes.

When I immerse myself in these lofty thoughts, I’m reminded of that scene from “Sleeping Beauty” when the king is warned the princess will die on her 16th birthday after she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. In an effort to control the destiny of one he loves, he issues a decree: “Burn all the spinning wheels!”

But, in the end, she manages to prick her finger anyway. The lesson I take from this is that there’s only so much you can control in life, even when you fancy you’re in charge of your entire kingdom.

And I try to draw succor from that.

When I met Jimmy, we were both 18. He arrived with swagger, a leather jacket and a motorcycle, the perfect accessory package for our stage of life. Years later, after we were engaged and planning our wedding, daring to speak of future children, I knew my groom needed a makeover.

A four-door sedan and a briefcase would fit neatly into the new era I envisioned, a little more “The Family Man,” a little less, “Rebel Without a Cause.”

As luck would have it, his motorcycle was stolen when he was working at a restaurant in Houston a few months before the wedding. It was the first time I saw him cry.

“They stole my effing bike!” he said.

“You don’t need a motorcycle,” I said. “We’re about to get married and have children. Motorcycles are too dangerous. We don’t want our kids growing up around them.” I quoted a statistic or two.

Things fell neatly into place when he purchased his grandmother’s old Plymouth Volare. I’ll never forget the first time he pulled into my parents’ driveway in that beast. He was still cool. His coolness was intrinsic to his persona and didn’t rely on his mode of transportation.

Nonetheless, the feeling I had that day is the way I imagine ranchers must feel when they break a prized stallion: The stallion may still be a masterful creature, but you know you’ve chiseled out a piece of his soul. That must be why I didn’t intervene more aggressively in what transpired 30 years later when he approached me with a big grin, thrust his laptop at me and said, “Look what I found on Craigslist!”

He had found his stolen bike. Or a bike that happened to be the same year, make, model and color with the same custom pin-striping.

“I always promised myself if I ever became successful,” he said, “I’d buy my bike back.”

Of course, I attempted to discourage him — straight out of the good wife handbook. But I also couldn’t deny how unselfishly he had worked to provide a life for me and our children, never indulging himself with pastimes or hobbies. Per my plan, he had morphed into the epitome of a family man. I didn’t feel like there was much I could say to dissuade him. After all, the youngest of our brood was packing for college.

He bought the bike, promising he would never ride on the interstate, without a helmet or at night. True to his word, he was killed in broad daylight on a country road behind our house. Strangers who witnessed him dying on the side of the road confirmed that his helmet was securely fastened.

The distracted driver who took his life had no driver’s license, no insurance and seemingly no remorse.

I find myself mulling over that college philosophy assignment and those two naïve young kids who thought a little BS would get us through anything. I know better now. As a widow with lived experience, I’m more invested these days in the truth the professor was getting at as opposed to the grade I sought.

Do we have free will? Can we make choices that will change the future? Yes, of course we can, and do. But we are also hurtling forward along some unalterable path over which we have little say.

All I know is there is vulnerability in loving another person with all your heart and soul, in building your life around someone else. And that is often so much more than we bargained for.

Leslie Blanchard is a writer in Oklahoma City.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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