The Elucidating Light of a Missed Sunset
Kristen M. Ploetz
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The white noise of running water renders the perfect soundtrack for the cinereous sky outside my rain spotted window. It is just before seven o’clock, the first Thursday evening of May. As I wash the last of the dinner dishes, my thoughts drift along seemingly random tangents. Two library books are overdue, a children’s book and a Stephen King novel published when I was eight. My daughter will soon be nine. Her laughter is changing. The snow peas, her favorite, are slow to grow this year, not even two inches tall. The sun is to blame, certainly as to that last one. It has been absent and coy this spring, and we are now on the fifth consecutive day of rain. A relentless spring rain so cold I must ball my hands into fists to keep my fingers warm and nimble, so raw I silently beg the dog to hold it just a little longer to see if the heavy cloudblanket will tender a break in the impenetrable damp.

With a view framed by distant maples and a mid-rise concrete apartment, the window above the kitchen sink faces west. It is a meager stage for a setting sun, yet I remain an enthusiastic season ticket holder. Not long after the vernal equinox, the sun slides down these twelve square panes, the show starting promptly at five then six then seven and back again as the weeks give way to the solstice. The nightly hues of descent and rotation change often, sometimes skewing pink and vibrant coral, other times luminous gold and orange. There’s never a repeat performance. It’s why I return so often.

I scrub two shallow roasting pans, one sticky with flakes of cod, the other with the crisp skin of red potatoes. I lament how it’s been too long since I’ve seen an honest, true dusk, the kind when our star properly whispers goodnight with its attendant rosy incandescence. The palpable absence tightens my shoulders as I consider what’s been missing for the fifth night in a row, how an opaque sky triggers claustrophobia. Then, without warning or easy transition, my thoughts swing wide along an unsettling trajectory. I start to wonder about all those people who died on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, or even sometime this very day, all before they ever got to behold just one more sunset. I often wade in these murky pools of life and death, moments that provide perspective or revive dormant gratitude, but never quite like this. This time, it is different. I am prompted into action. 

I dry my hands on the limp kitchen towel hanging from the stove. I need to know, to honor, those lives in some kind of tangible way. I am compelled to somehow take better stock of my own fortuity that, on balance, my chance of witnessing another sunset seems quite certain. I need to do this because I think I’ve forgotten. 

The day’s obituaries glow on my computer screen and I scan the names. I stop at a man in his early sixties. William, though he went by “Bill”. On Monday night, he died unexpectedly. That is, of course, without the expectation death would happen so soon and without the usual warnings offered by age or illness. But if we are being sincere, death can never be truly unexpected. Misnomers abound for the complacent and fearful among us, it seems. He liked to fish. I imagine him in his boat, connected to the water by rod, line, and hook, waiting in the waning sun of a summer day. Was he buoyed by any of those remembered sunsets on his last, unsuspecting day, that first one filled with this dismal rain? My deep hope is yes.

James died the same day as Bill, but lived a longer life. A merchant marine who sailed on cruise ships and played golf, a Florida winter bird with a dozen great-grandchildren. I think of all the sunsets he must have seen at sea and on the coast, or while walking between the last of eighteen holes, boasting about his large family. Perhaps it is a meager number when compared to the hundreds of thousands the youngest of his issue will collectively witness, but it is impressive and fortuitous nonetheless. And, so far, more than I have ever seen myself.

I continue to scan the names. At one hundred years old, maybe Ruth had the luckiest roll of the dice. She died on Sunday, the day before Bill and James. I wonder whether she looked out her window the day before, the last brilliant day of full sun before the rain set in. Did she see the sun slink below the horizon? My heart swells into my throat, and tears come for a woman I never even knew. I find myself fervently wishing that those waning rays of sun somehow warmed her face in her remaining hours of breath and introspection about a life lived to the fullest of lengths.

Soon I am rattled by my voyeurism, cheap and electric. I realize I don’t want to hold the weight of all those sunless last twilights for these men and women, their whole lives condensed to mere inches of highlights and lineage on a backlit screen. Like trespassing on a private path, it feels lazy, narcissistic even, to make a spectacle of their lives for the sake of solving my own impermanence and insecurity. It diminishes the burden actually being carried by their survivors, the ones who knew and loved them in a way I never could. I close my laptop and offer a silent apology. 

With renewed resolve, I contemplate the forecast ahead: a bit more rain and, eventually, sun. I vow that when it comes I will savor it with new tenor, no sunset to be taken for granted, never knowing which one might be my last. For a moment I wonder how often Bill and Ruth and James made promises like these, and how often they broke them, disillusioned by the expectation of ample tomorrows. I never knew these strangers reduced to names on a screen, but on this shadowless day it is they who show me why I should no longer repeatedly break this promise myself.

About the Author: 
Kristen M. Ploetz is a writer and former land use attorney living in Massachusetts. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) with The Hopper, The Healing Muse, NYT Motherlode, The Manifest-Station, The Humanist, Modern Farmer, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, and elsewhere. She is working on a collection of short stories. She can also be found on Twitter (@KristenPloetz).
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