I ask my sister if she's seen the commercial for Diflucan, a new yeast-infection medication that is less messy than the suppository Monistat. One rare but possible side effect of Diflucan is liver damage. Monistat is to suppository inconvenience as Diflucan is to possible liver damage – What is wrong with this picture?
I'm amuse, but my sister is distracted because she has been asked to a**ess the value of her dead children's lives. She has to meet with an insurance adjuster. So far they have only spoken on the phone. He wants her to put together information on her children, think of it as a scrapbook, he'd said. Report cards, medical records, extracurricular activities. My sister isn't crying as she tells me this. Instead she seems distracted and impatient. I am asking the questions she asked the adjuster and she is irritated with this reflection of herself. She wants to say to me the two words she wanted to say to him.
In preparation and by chance I read a piece about insurance adjusters in Harper's written by a guy named Adam Davidson. The title “Working Stiffs” had the flat humor of puns – ha ha humor. More than anything I want to tell my sister about Davidson's piece, but I don't want to risk generalizing her experience. What I know, I know because of Davidsion; what she knows, she knows because she is being made to perform a life I don't want to live. I ask questions, all the ones Davidson has already answered.