Or Not to Be

Alive, Anna considered leaving her husband. Dead, she naively believes she has escaped this difficult choice. How cruel for relationship problems to tag along to the dead side. On November eleventh, Anna Wixim, mother of two, number geek and palindrome seeker, finds herself dead at forty-four. While wandering the universe and watching her family grieve, Anna learns that the two-way portal between her life and death remains wide open. Still, Anna hesitates to return to the man she loves. She has many reasons, real and imagined, to hesitate. The universe is full of wonder; time is boundless; she doesn't have to do laundry. And her husband doesn't want her back. Based on his own experience in crossing a yawning space-time gap, her husband, Eddie, understands the rules of the universe, including Anna's free choice to come back to him. He also knows that she doubts his love because he forgot to say that he loved her-for twenty years. On top of that, he wasn't even nice for the last two months of her life. Don't judge. It wasn't fair for the universe to reveal Anna's deathday to him. Eddie couldn't function, couldn't have a conversation or take a full breath, faced each year with the relentless approach of November eleventh.