Congratulations on Your Coronary Failure!

You’ve been living pretty rough over the last few years. Since your wife left you it’s been binge drinking and binge eating almost non-stop. It’s all you can try to do to fill the void in your heart and, of course, it’s failing.

So next week when you finally up and try a speedball to ease the pain your body is going to flip shit and you’re going to go into cardiac arrest. You’ll technically die for around six minutes before you’re resuscitated by a team of doctors and one night nurse named Charlene.

It will be Charlene’s last night as a night nurse and she’ll be transferred the next day, ironically enough, to the recovery ward where you’ll spend the next two weeks laying in bed like the lazy son of a bitch you are, pumped full of the best drugs your HMO can find.

She’ll be watching you every day, fascinated by your case and your recovery. She truly cares for you, and all those like you who fall under her care, and she wants to see you well again. Nearly every spare moment will be spent over your unconscious form until, twenty-eight hours after your surgery, your eyes flutter open and you catch your first sight of her.

“Shit,” you’ll say gruffly, “I’m dead.”

She’ll smile and burst out laughing.

Two weeks later, when the two of you lay together naked in your apartment, forms tangled together, she’ll tell you she fell in love with you at that moment. She’d been fascinated by you before, your insides and the miraculous way you lived against all odds. But when you said that, a shivering mass of human weakness finding beauty in the world around him, she fell for you.

As for you, you’ll be engaged by her beauty, her intellect, and her kindness. She’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you, and when you die mid-coitus in around three months after you guys decided to get more experimental it’ll be just what you’d always hoped for.

Charlene will hold you as you go. By then she’ll understand the tortured mess your life had become, and she’ll have given you a brief respite before your final rest. She’ll know that you’re happier this way, and even though she’ll weep after your eyes close she’ll smile all the while as your breathing struggles and you stare at her face.

When she leans in to kiss you one last time, she truly will take your breath away, and you’ll slip into the long gray hereafter.

You’ll end up in hell, since the two of you weren’t married and it turns out God is kind of a dick about this sort of thing, but hell won’t actually be that bad. It'll be a lot like the normal world, but with all the famous and intelligent people you always wanted to meet and a bunch of your friends who died young under a variety of circumstances.

So anyhow, we’re glad you found this small moment of joy towards the end of your life. You’ve certainly had it coming after the last decade. Congratulations on your coronary failure. Without it this beauty would be lost to you. Symbolic, n’est pas?