We’re pretty hazy on what happens after we die. Conventional chatter has it being somewhere between nothing at all and eternal life where everything is perfect down to the point where you even get your departed dogs back. Or hell. That’s an oft-cited possible destination as well.
A sort of dark-horse contender suggests maybe you just kind of hang around for a while thinking you’re still alive, like Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.” That’s what we felt like over the weekend when we heard that we were, to dance past the euphemisms, dead.
Because we never stop working, we checked our voice messages on Saturday morning and heard the voice of an angry woman. It’s a sound we know too well. If we were to categorize the types of phone messages we get, Angry Women would top the list, edging out Men Initially Coming Across as Reasonable Before Exploding Into Lunacy.
The woman wasn’t addressing us, for reasons that will be apparent, but, rather, whatever heartless soul was charged with retrieving our messages.
She said: “I’m just so outraged that they would put a picture of Tim Grobaty as columnist in the current newspaper and leave a voice message from him when in fact he has passed away. What kind of people are you to do such a thing? He’s passed on. It’s stupid. I’m sorry he did pass away but why are you doing this?”
We had to agree with the woman. It is kind of sick to keep propping us up and putting our picture in the paper to make it appear that we’re still alive. It smacks of fraud, or at the very least “Waking Ned Divine” or “Weekend at Bernie’s” (there seems to be a lot of movies based on our colorful post-life experiences).
We have to admit, we briefly questioned our existence after hearing the message. Not in some egg-headed ontological way, but more in a “can we now walk through walls?” sort of way. Can we see our reflection in a mirror? Will our specter raise our dogs’ hackles?
After a few moments of weird musings, we took the Cartesian way back to the living. We thought, ergo we were still existing (although it prompted the question “if there are ghosts can they think, or do they just move furniture and coffee cups around and disturb the drapes?”).
With logical thought invading our occult theories, we figured that the outraged caller had us confused with former longtime columnist Tom Hennessy, who passed away on April 2.
Our careers intersected at the Press-Telegram for 27 years, and after we started writing a daily column, about a third of the time people addressed us as “Tom.” We’re pretty sure no one ever called Tom “Tim.”
Still, we can sort of see the confusion. Tims and Toms tend to pack up. For a while, we used to go out every day for coffee with our friends Tim, Tom, Tom and Tom’s grandson Tim Tom.
Our grandmother used to call us Jim (her son, our dad’s name), but more often she’d call us Tim first, then miscorrect herself with Jim, then recorrect herself with Tim so it would come out Timjimtim.
But it’s not a big deal. We don’t mind being confused with Hennessy or our pop.
We’re just happy to be alive.
Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, tim.grobaty@langnews.com, @grobaty on Twitter.
