Walter McKenna

Walter McKenna’s heart stopped when he found out the final episode of Doctor’s Orders was airing that night.  Walter McKenna was not any particular fan of Doctor’s Orders; in fact he had never seen the program.  It was simply that the strain of realizing yet another sitcom had gone through its entire run without his seeing even one episode was too much for him to bear, and his heart subsequently stopped.

The family dog, an especially nervous Alsatian named Harley, sensing the tension in the air, retreated upstairs to Walter’s closet and very skillfully defecated in one of Walter’s penny loafers.  

Due to Walter’s habit of using an unusually excessive amount of mothballs, and the pungent cologne he sprayed onto the inside of his suit coat every morning, this fact was not discovered until two days later, when Walter’s wife Elizabeth was choosing a suit for his wake.  It was the first time in three days that she’d stopped crying, but only until she discovered what she had stuck her hand into.  

Now when Walter McKenna died, this was strange for two reasons.  First, it was only the third recorded case of sitcom-induced cardiac arrest, and second, because Walter McKenna was not watching, discussing or reading about Doctor’s Orders when he had his heart attack.  Rather, Walter McKenna was sitting on the rusty glider on his back porch, waiting for Elizabeth to bring back another iced tea while he recalled a conversation he had heard earlier that day.  In that conversation, two co-workers were discussing a controversy that had recently erupted in the media, concerning the show’s two lead actors, and how it might affect the live recording of the finale, airing that night.  It was in this instant, when he actually processed the information he had heard hours earlier, that a wave of anxiety and fear contorted Walter’s face into a mask of horror and grotesque humanity that would later require 13 hours for the mortician to fix.  These circumstances would therefore mean that the true cause of Walter’s heart attack would go unreported.  As a result, there remain only two recorded cases of sitcom-induced cardiac arrest.

Walter’s death presented a dilemma for Elizabeth McKenna, who had been contemplating leaving her husband for quite some time.  Elizabeth had never forgotten her first love, Dwayne Brown, who she dated in her second year of college.  It had progressed as far as a marriage proposal, but because Dwayne had just joined the Peace Corps and Elizabeth was eager to get started on a family, she declined.  If she was quite embarrassingly honest with herself, she was also afraid that people, prejudiced as they were, would treat their children differently.  You see, Elizabeth had promised her mother she would name her children after their grandparents, Beatrice and Bradley, and since she and had always felt that parents who bestow their children alliterative names were “squares”, she had to decline.  Two years later she met Walter, and the two were married after eight months.  

Dwayne Brown had moved back to the area three years ago.  While she loved Walter, Elizabeth had always wondered if her life would have been better with Dwayne.  More excitement?  More passion?  Less problems?  It’s not that her marriage to Walter was bad; it was very good, in fact.  There was an abundance of love and tolerance, they went on a yearly vacation, and they raised two beautiful children, named after Elizabeth’s parents.  However, Elizabeth had come to find it routine, and a bit boring.  With her children already born and named, and Dwayne long back from the Peace Corps, all that was stopping her was the prospect of moving, which was a nuisance and a strain on her lower back.

Now however, with the impending windfall from Walter’s life insurance, she could afford to hire movers.  That wind, she later found, would never fall as Walter had failed to purchase any life insurance in the previous thirty eight years, despite what he had told his wife.  Instead, Walter had calculated that with the money he’d have to spend on life insurance, he could get two cupcakes everyday with his lunch at work, and since a life of cupcakes is infinitely preferable to an afterlife of financial assurance, cupcakes it was.  

Elizabeth’s rejection actually worked out quite well for Dwayne, as he would later find out while in the Peace Corps that he was gay.  This is of course no reflection on the Peace Corps, which has helped people in over 139 countries since its inception in 1961.  Rather, Dwayne’s time in the Peace Corps was simply an enlightening experience for him, and the first time he was able to be truly honest with himself.  This discovery led him to think back on his proposal to Elizabeth with embarrassment and a tinge of disgust over the fact that he had lied to himself for so long.  This realization came over a particularly lovely pesto, served to him by a Norwegian waiter named Sven, upon whom Dwayne developed a quite rapid and unexpected crush.  Coincidentally, he also discovered during that very meal that while he was rather fond of olive oil, he violently despised olives.  

This fact had a relatively minimal effect on Dwayne’s life, until years later when he was unexpectedly invited to the wake of his ex-girlfriend’s deceased husband and ate a quesadilla wedge.  This very typical quesadilla, which very typically contained olives, produced a very atypical reaction in Dwayne.  Since he discovered both at the same time, Dwayne had mentally attached his distaste for olives with his disgust at his straight life, and the resulting reaction was so strong that he vomited all over a lovely collage display of McKenna family photos he was viewing.  Thankfully, the collage had been laminated earlier that day, and would clean up just fine, only to be stored and forgotten in the attic a week later.  There it would remain for a further eleven years until it was thrown away by Beatrice McKenna while cleaning out her mother’s house just two hours after moving her into Horizons Retirement Community, twenty six miles away.  

Previous to the quesadilla incident, Dwayne hadn’t heard from anyone in the McKenna family in more than two decades.  Rather, Elizabeth had invited him to the wake without telling him it was, in fact, a wake, suddenly calling him one day suggesting they “get together and reminisce”.  Since it was a Saturday in July, and since they met at a coffee shop down the street, Dwayne was understandably underdressed for a wake.  In fact, it was most people’s opinion his dress was even more inappropriate for a wake than the quesadillas, traditionally a festive food.  He was, however, a very compassionate man, and when Elizabeth showed up at the coffee shop dressed all in black, ordered black coffee and casually mentioned that her husband Walter had just had a fatal heart attack, he decided he couldn’t just leave her, no matter how inappropriately he was dressed.  Dwayne hadn’t planned on attending Walter’s wake, but when Elizabeth walked him to the Two Brothers’ Funeral Home afterward, explaining that she was merely taking a break between the first and second showings, his compassion took over and he followed her inside.

This was the beginning of Beatrice McKenna’s disgust with her mother; watching Elizabeth divide her time quite manically between flirting with Dwayne and crying over the casket, and it was this image that Beatrice played in her head as she drove away from Horizons Retirement Community eleven years later.  She would visit her mother a total of fourteen times over the ensuing seven years, always managing to leave before dinner and often before lunch.  Her personal best occurred on the last of these visits, where she managed to arrive, visit, and leave by 10 am on the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s death.

Shortly afterward, Elizabeth McKenna’s heart stopped when she found out that a rerun of the final episode of Doctor’s Orders was airing that night.  Elizabeth McKenna was not any particular fan of Doctor’s Orders; in fact she had never seen the program.  It was, however, at that moment that Elizabeth decided she would no longer waste her life watching pointless sitcoms, rose from her seat and proceeded out of the common room, intending to sit in the garden and consider the lilies.  Sadly, she mistakenly opened the door to the maintenance closet instead and happened upon two orderlies copulating, the strain of which was too much for her to bear, and her heart subsequently stopped.