Today would have been Wife Kay, aka Mistress Kay, aka the Mighty Sa and my 5th wedding anniversary.
Would have been.
For those of you who don’t know either of us well, but have witnessed our relationship through the filter of social media and this blog, this news is probably quite surprising. I mean, that’s Mistress Kay, that’s my boo, we’d already been idiots in love for almost seventeen years. If our relationship was a person, it would be so old that it has reached the age of consent in most states. You may very well have thought that it could have kept going strong just on inertia and habit at this point.
Sadly, even good things end.
For those of you who know ME very well, this is probably not surprising at all. I mean, it’s me. I was sure to mess things up eventually, on account of who I am as a person (dumb, terrible, bad morning breath).
For those of you who know Mistress Kay very well, it’s also probably not that surprising. Between her concerning obsession with True Crime Podcasts, and the countless Hallmark movies she watches during the holiday season, it was only a matter of time before she either fed me into a wood-chipper or left me for a simple but kind-hearted single dad who taught her the true meaning of Christmas after she got stuck in her old hometown by a surprise snowstorm. Or both. Maybe he runs the wood-chipper rental place.
WELL GUESS WHAT. I didn’t mess up, and Mistress hasn’t been spirited away from our sophisticated big city life by some strapping townie offering heavy-equipment rentals at unbeatable low prices. No, our marriage ended before our fifth wedding anniversary due to the simple fact that our vows stated that we were to be joined in matrimony until death do us part, and Mistress, well…she died.
Thankfully, she got better.
Come with me, if you will, on a journey, a shared hallucination, as I paint a picture in your mind’s eye of my past year using the power of strategically placed words. Let me tell you a story. The story of the Mighty Lich, Undead Kay.
The story of Lich Kay begins, as all Lich stories do, with a death. That’s basically a liches whole thing after all. Their stories don’t end when they die, that’s when they start. Lich Kay’s story however is interesting because it does not begin with her own death, but with a much less recent demise. Specifically, my grandfather’s. When my Big Momma was only a Small Child, tragically, her father died, as was the style at the time. Then, a few years later, her stepfather died, also young and I assume full of regret. A pattern was emerging.
My own father, a style conscious individual, and not one to miss out on any trends, continued the pattern by dying horribly whilst still flush with youthful juvenescence.
Sure, this may be a small population sample, a miniscule n value, barely enough data to establish a statistical pattern at all, but what can I say, I like playing fast and loose with percentages, and as far as I was concerned the data was irrefutable. The men in my family die young and badly. Growing up, I always assumed I would carry on the family tradition. How could I not? The data had spoken. I was doomed.
In my misspent youth, I’ll admit that I acted out, took risks, and engaged in self-destructive behavior, because I didn’t think it mattered. I figured that I wouldn’t live long enough to experience any long-term consequences, so I might as well do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and wallow in senseless hedonism. Then, I got a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and I found that I had things to live for. A wife. A child. Family and Friends. An ever-growing list of unresolved grudges. A neat stick I found on a hike. My priorities began to change, as did my choices. I still assumed I would die young, but I thought it might be worth staving off the grim specter of death for a few more years if possible. Consequently, I tried to eat well. Exercise. Avoid risks. I sold my motorcycle. Stopped driving on the highway at night. Slightly reduced my illicit drug use. Put less bullets in the revolver when I played Russian Roulette. Etc.
Even so, after these many lifestyle changes, it turns out my efforts were all for naught. I had gotten it wrong. The data – Misinterpreted. The conclusion – Erroneous. It was never about me.
It’s not the men that die young in my family. It’s the spouses.
Six months ago, with no warning, after a perfectly normal day, while relaxing in bed Mistress Kay went into sudden cardiac arrest, her heart stopped, and she died.
Fear not, gentle reader, as I said before, she got better. Thankfully, I was in bed with her at the time, and thankfully I was awake, and thankfully I noticed something going horribly wrong when Mistress Kay began agonal breathing and I couldn’t get her to wake up, and thankfully I immediately called 911, and most thankfully of all there was a police car equipped with a defibrillator very close by, because 911 dispatch was able to redirect them to our home and they were able to get upstairs to our bedroom to take over CPR and administer the defibrillator to Mistress Kay’s unresponsive body quickly enough to revive her. The Mighty Sa is Mighty indeed because she stared the devil in the face, flashed him her titties, and moonwalked out of hell and back into life like a BOSS.
What, then have been the consequences of that horrible, terrifying event? Well, the immediate result was I had to scramble to find care for our one-year-old daughter, and then chased the ambulance carrying my frail queen all the way to the hospital, where she spent a week in the cardiac ICU, kept company by either myself or our beloved Molds, and underwent a barrage of tests which ultimately culminated in a diagnosis of genetic long QT syndrome (basically her heart is mechanically perfect, but the electrical system for her heart is messed up and it takes slightly too long in between beats for the heart to reset which, over a long enough period of time can result in an arrythmia and death). Her diagnosis led to the implantation of a pacemaker defibrillator device into her chest to prevent arrythmias and sudden cardiac death in the future.
Longer term, there were more doctors, more appointments, more tests, and a long recovery, but the good news is that she now has a clean bill of health (genetic syndrome notwithstanding), and we have received genetic test results verifying which “version” of long QT Syndrome Mistress had inherited, and we have also verified that not only is the medication she has been prescribed to prevent any future issues the correct medicine for the job, but our daughter did NOT inherit the mutation, and should not be at risk of developing prolonged QT.
Longest term, I can never sleep again because if I do all my loved ones will die and it will have been my fault for not remaining hyper vigilant and prepared, but hey, at least we still get to spend the rest of my life together before I die of a stress stroke on the toilet. Mistress gets to experience our daughter growing up. We get to continue being in love. And Mistress is now a Frankensteinian cyborg powered by forbidden machinery from the dark age of technology.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, technically Mistress Kay died, so technically the terms of our wedding contract have been fulfilled, and technically we’re no longer a married couple. We’re just living in sin once again, right where we belong, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Especially because Mistress has become an abomination, an unnatural monstrosity, an affront to all the gods.
That’s right, the whole Lich thing.
You see, a zombie is a reanimated undead body bereft of a governing intelligence or soul. A ghost is a misplaced soul without a body. A vampire is a soulless undead body, weak to the sun, which retains its intelligence and is sustained by blood. And a Lich, of course, is an intelligent revenant, usually formed intentionally through sorcerous means by a powerful mage seeking a limited form of immortality by binding their soul and powers to an artifact called a phylactery, which, as long as it remains intact, prevents their death and dissolution even if grievous harm befalls their body.
Let’s break it down. Mistress Kay ::dies::. Then her body is reanimated, therefore making her an undead. She retains her faculties however, so she is not a mindless zombie, and she has shown no especial changes in her dietary preferences, nor any particular aversion to sunlight, so vampirism is unlikely. What does that leave us? She is intelligent. Her body was ritualistically carved into by masked men with strange and esoteric knowledge (surgery by doctors). And finally, she now carries a hidden artifact (ICD implant) which prevents her death even if her heart were to stop once again (phylactery).
LOOK AT THE DATA PEOPLE. THERE’S ONLY ONE ANSWER THAT FITS.
The fleeting reign of Wife Kay is over. Now is the time of the Lich. UNDEAD KAY IS HERE TO STAY.
I for one welcome my new monstrous overlord.
I wonder what the rules are about inter-mortal marriage…. I’m thinking about popping the question. Again.