Dear Senior Employment Recruiter:
Thank you for posting my job listing below. A little context first: Though I’ve honed many skills in my nearly seven decades, I excel at one thing above all else: something I’ve dubbed pre-emptive grieving. To reduce my workload (and preserve my sanity), I’ve decided to outsource my obsession. Thank you for helping me find the ideal candidate.
Seeking someone compelled to obsess on the possibility of a tragic outcome in all situations in order to karmically prevent worst-case scenarios from actually taking place.
Job Description
The successful candidate will be tasked with creating the darkest something from nothing.
If you call “Don’t die today!” as your partner leaves for work each morning, an inside joke that brings a laugh but leaves a lump of fear in your throat, you may be a good fit for this role. Picturing yourself in your house alone, though your loved one seems perfectly fine, is further evidence of your prowess. You can do life solo, but the thing is, you don’t want to, and you’ll worry full time to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Duties include
- Lying awake nights mentally staging sudden tragedy and/or death
- Vividly imagining losing everything that makes you feel safe and loved
- Saying “I love you” with unusual frequency
- Saving voicemail messages, in case they end up being the only record of a loved one’s voice
- Snapping mental (and actual) pictures of family and friends, aka “freezing this moment to remember forever,” to create an archive to draw from once your loved ones are unexpectedly gone forever
Have you been recording life since you were small, tightly gripping all the things you couldn’t make last? This is exactly the sort of forethought we’re looking for.
Do you possess the following qualities?
*Communication skills, for sharing your worries in such a way that others seamlessly join in the fear
*Compassion, or a deep level of empathy, for putting yourself in the target situation and mourning losses not yet on the horizon. Highly sensitive personality type is a plus.
*Critical thinking skills, for adjusting doomsday scenarios to fit novel situations as new information comes to light.
Does “this could be the last time” ring through your mind each time you leave someone you care for? You can never prepare, and we suspect you know this. But if you get caught in an infinite loop of anxiety regardless, we’d like to meet with you.
Have you completed these essential prerequisites?
*Parental illness during childhood, preferably protracted and culminating in early death; or parental absence, emotional or literal. Orphans preferred.
*Frequent moves in childhood and/or additional destabilizing factors (e.g., inadequate nurturing, bullying, etc.)
*Documented history of decision-making based on fear of abandonment and loss
If as a child you stood beside a parent’s bedside wondering how to say goodbye forever, or if you learned to dissociate when your classmates tormented you—calling names, pitching hard candy in your direction, passing notes you refused to read—you may already have the perfect combination of trauma-management and self-preservation skills we require.
If you met a man who was cute (and liked you) but who was wrong for you, married him anyway, then placed your well-being squarely in his hands because they felt like home, you may be just the person we’re looking for.
Subsequent deaths—of surrogate parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, close friends—will work to your advantage. Death of a child will result in immediate hire.
Salary and Benefits
Remuneration for this position comes in the form of intangible rewards, including maintaining a false sense of control, ensuring nothing bad ever happens, and establishing the age-old misery-loves-company scenario. Fringe benefits include monthly sessions with the company therapist (more frequent sessions may result in diminished skills).
Does pre-emptive grieving plague you? Perhaps it runs through your head like the movie script you’ve been compiling all your life. “And that was the last time they spoke,” says the narrator. “She couldn’t have known that by tomorrow he’d be gone.”
However, if you’re sometimes able to rise above the landscape in a different way, this is not the position for you. Do you see us all here protecting our territory whatever the cost? Have you begun to see you’re not in control, that you never were? If you’ve begun to pray not for a specific outcome but for the courage to accept whatever comes, I suggest you look elsewhere.
To qualified candidates: Thank you for your interest, and I’m deeply sorry for everything.
Disclaimer
*Evolved individuals opposed to chasing one’s tail, controlling life at all costs, and making oneself distraught on a regular basis need not apply.
Casey Mulligan Walsh writes about living with grief beside joy and embracing uncertainty. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Hippocampus, Split Lip, Barren Magazine, and numerous other media outlets and literary journals. She is a founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine. Casey’s memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, about the search for belonging, the fight to save a struggling child, and the quest to find meaning in the wake of repeated loss, is forthcoming from Motina Books on February 18, 2025. Learn more at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Rob Oo
