My father always had a tall, tottering pile of New York Timeses next to his side of the bed.  His filing cabinet in the basement was a dust covered mess– he really had no discernible filing system.   The steering wheel of the Buick Regal he drove into the ground before giving it to me as a gift was blackened.  I had to scrub it with some kind of solvent before I started driving it, and nobody would call me a fastidious man.

“Your father is pretty much a pig,” my mother would observe from time to time.  A much better housekeeper herself, the surfaces of her kitchen, bedroom and other rooms were always clear and clean.  Her drawers and closets were crammed with a jumble of things, but that is another story.

“You got that letter today from fecal bronze Obamacare, soon to be terrific, actual shit-bronze Trumpcare, about denial of payment to two of the doctors you were referred to and you’re taking it out on your dead parents?” said the skeleton.  

No, I was just giving a bit of meaningless preface for my uncle’s filing system, which was, by contrast, quite meticulous.  

“Yes, he was definitely the anal-retentive of the two of us,” said the skeleton.  

After your brother died my cousin and I were going through his neatly organized filing cabinet and spotted a file with your name on it.   I took that file back to New York, after flipping through it. There were receipts from the hotel in Peekskill where we stayed for the funeral and another one where we stayed a year later for the unveiling.  There were car rental slips, paid toll slips, restaurant receipts.

“Nobody ever claimed my brother wasn’t mad as a hatter,” said the skeleton.  “In fact, you could make a case he even looked a bit like a rabbit.”

In that file folder, toward the back, I saw the other day, was a copy of the draft obituary he’d handed me to place in the New York Times the day after you died.  I placed it not in the New York Times, but on a nearby coffee table, and never saw it again.   Trying to clean one of the cluttered surfaces at her farm the other day Sekhnet came across the file folder with your name on it.  

“Mazel tov,” said the skeleton, “now, get over the galling inadequacy of the fecal bronze health insurance you have, and call one of the two New York City nephrologists in the network, Dr. Wooin Ahn or Dr. Qais Alawquati, call one or both, find out where their office is located and go have a covered kidney exam, before it’s too late.   You don’t want to fuck with your kidneys, look what happened to me.

“And either try to forget about the odd numbness in your left arm, and the stiffness and flickers of palpitation in your slightly dilated left atrium, or find a cardiologist in your network, demand a referral and go see the fuck, it’s been literally months now.    

“But don’t forget what happened to me, with my genius team of specialized medical experts.  Like your friend’s father used to say: doctors and lawyers don’t think for you.  You have to ask all the right questions.  You might start with ‘What the fuck, yo?'”