Lasagna

Jason wasn’t feeling well. He couldn’t stay sitting up any longer. Slowly, he lay down on the sofa. He would clear the lasagna from the table later. Maybe he shouldn’t have eaten so quickly; normally, he would divide the lasagna into at least thirty pieces and finish it in thirty bites. But for some reason, that evening, he had finished his meal in ten pieces, as if he had been craving it.

Jason, who lived alone, made sure to have a serving of lasagna at least once a week. Over time, he had ordered from many different places until he found the restaurant that made the lasagna he liked best, and he became a regular there. Sometimes, when something good happened to him or he’d had a difficult week, he would eat lasagna twice that week as a way of treating himself. Lasagna was by far his favorite food.

When he lay down, he started feeling even worse. It felt as though his heart was slowing down and his eyelids were getting heavier. He had never experienced anything like this physically before. He was scared, but he couldn’t find the energy to get up and call anyone.

He didn’t know if these were his final moments. Maybe his blood pressure was dropping and he was about to pass out. But even so, he thought, ‘’Better safe than sorry. Maybe I’m dying.’’ He said it to himself with a calmness he wouldn’t have expected from himself.

He took his dentures out of his mouth. He quickly picked a few memories to think about one last time. He chose two from his childhood, four from his youth, two from middle age, and two from more recent times, from when he was eighty-five, and went over them in his mind one last time. “I’m probably overreacting,” he told himself. After all, he didn’t know what dying was supposed to feel like. But he could feel that he had very little energy left. He didn’t want to take any chances. For him, there was something much more important than remembering his old happy memories one last time: there was one thing he had wanted to do for a very long time; die with the taste of lasagna in his mouth.

He checked the taste in his mouth. He sucked in the saliva from the insides of his cheeks and swallowed it. He ran his tongue over his palate. But no, he couldn’t taste as much lasagna as he wanted.

He turned his head to the right and looked at his dentures sitting on the side table next to the sofa. They looked disgusting. But he had discovered the problem. All the lasagna was stuck between the teeth and all over them.

With one final effort, using up what little energy he had left, he picked up his dentures and put them back in his mouth.

And now it was perfect. Damn dentures, they had preserved all the lasagna flavor. He could now taste the lasagna in all its fullness, as if he had popped a piece of lasagna-flavored gum into his mouth. He smiled.

Then, just as before falling asleep, he got lost in long questions and long trains of thought:

‘’Why did I take my dentures out in the first place? It must have been because of what my friend Charlie told me when I was fifty… If I don’t die, I’m going to celebrate tomorrow with lasagna… No, I didn’t do it because of what Charlie told me. I did it out of reflex. You know, you take your dentures out before going to sleep… Reflex, that’s all… I don’t think I’m going to die. This isn’t what dying feels like… Lasagna should be eaten in at least thirty pieces… I wonder what my dentist is doing right now… Is my daughter asleep? She doesn’t usually go to bed this early…’’

And so Jason’s thoughts kept flowing, sometimes connected to one another and sometimes completely unrelated.

Jason died three years after this incident, while in intensive care at a hospital. Because the circumstances weren’t right, he didn’t get to die with the taste of lasagna in his mouth the way he had wanted.