I was mowing the lawn today in ninety-five degree heat, humid enough that after twenty minutes I was completely soaked through and the sweat kept running into my eyes. The back section of the yard had gotten too tall and I was working my way through it, pushing the mower slowly because the grass kept bunching up under the deck, when I saw something black lying maybe fifteen feet in front of me. I assumed it was a tree branch. There are always branches back there. But as I got closer I realized it wasn’t a branch at all. It was a crow, an enormous one, lying dead in the tall grass.

It hadn’t been dead very long. Its eye was still intact and there were only a few flies beginning to buzz around it. I stopped the mower and stared at the thing for a while.

I am a rational person and rational people do not believe in omens. This is something I know. A crow dying in my backyard has no relationship whatsoever to my arthroscopic shoulder surgery tomorrow. The universe does not know I am having this procedure and it certainly does not send birds ahead to warn me about it. There are probably twenty completely ordinary reasons a crow might die in a suburban backyard during a heat wave.

But there is also this very old piece of my brain that knows crows appear when death is present, and once that association lit up it was difficult to turn it off. Some part of me looked at the crow and thought: They are coming for me.

And that feeling I'd had all weekend – the thing I'd been trying to seal off in a separate and small corridor of my mind, suddenly leaked through and forced me to acknowledge it.

I am really, really afraid of the surgery tomorrow.

I keep trying to qualify this because the surgery is not especially exotic. They are going into my left shoulder arthroscopically, repairing what needs to be repaired, removing a cyst and repositioning the biceps tendon. The surgeon does these procedures all the time. I will presumably go in tomorrow morning, get knocked out, wake up later with my arm in a sling and spend the next several weeks complaining about how difficult it is to sleep.

This knowledge does not dissipate the fear.

The anesthesia is the part that bothers me most. I have had anesthesia before and apparently survived it because I am sitting here writing this, but there is something fundamentally disturbing about voluntarily allowing another human being to extinguish your consciousness. People call it being “put to sleep,” which I suppose sounds nicer than accurately describing what is happening. Sleep is familiar. I have some ownership over sleep. Anesthesia is handing control of my body to somebody else and trusting that when they are finished doing whatever they need to do, I will come back.

And because I am married now, my imagination doesn’t stop with me.

I keep thinking about Jennie if something goes wrong. Someone coming out to talk to her. Her driving home alone. Her walking into this house where practically everything would still look exactly the same except I would no longer be in it. I know this is dramatic considering I am having shoulder surgery and not storming Normandy, but fear doesn’t seem particularly interested in keeping probabilities in perspective.

We still have one frozen IVF embryo and I had the strange thought today that if I died tomorrow I wonder if she would use it.

Would she still do the transfer? Would she want to try to have our child after I was gone? Would that feel like continuing something we started together or would it feel awful, like deliberately creating a permanent reminder of somebody who had just died? I think I would want her to do it, although that is very easy for hypothetical dead me to say because hypothetical dead me does not have to raise the child or explain any of this to anybody.

I don’t know why my brain has decided this is useful material to work through the night before surgery. I am hoping that putting these ideas to page will make them go away later on instead of returning to haunt me through a fully conscious night.

Earlier in the day, while avoiding work, I went through my old journal looking for entries about my shoulder because I wanted to remind myself how long this has actually been going on. I expected to find a kind of documentary record of the problem. Instead I found almost nothing.

There are scattered references. My shoulder hurts, the fucking rotator cuff yet again. A crinkle and snap. The shoulder sometimes popping out of joint. A note that I should never do shoulder presses again after feeling it pop during an exercise. Various little modifications to workouts because something in the shoulder or elbow or back was hurting.

That’s about it.

And this created another completely irrational line of thought: if the shoulder was really bad enough to require surgery, why didn’t I write about it more?

I think the answer is that chronic physical problems bore me.

This surprised me when I realized it, but it makes sense. You can only write “my shoulder hurts again” so many times before there is nothing left to say about it. At some point it becomes like mentioning the air. The shoulder hurts, so I don’t do that exercise anymore. The shoulder pops, so I move my arm differently. I stop sleeping in a certain position. I reach behind myself carefully. I change the workout. I work around the thing until working around it is no longer noteworthy. It is routine.

Maybe that is one of the stranger things about chronic pain: the amount of space something takes up in your actual life can be completely different from the amount of space it takes up in the story you tell about your life.

My journal is full of work problems, house projects, marriage, IVF, getting older, stupid things people said to me, whatever video game I am playing and how to stack the best equipment to break the game, whether I am doing enough with my life. The shoulder mostly appears as a sentence fragment every few months when it becomes bad enough to break the pattern again.

And now, because tomorrow someone is actually going to cut into it and permanently alter things, I find myself searching those fragments for proof that I have suffered enough to justify doing this.

Which is ridiculous. The journal is not a medical record.

Still, I apparently want evidence tonight.

Maybe what I really want is certainty, and there isn’t any. I want certainty that the surgery is necessary, certainty that it will work, certainty that the anesthesia will be uneventful, certainty that six months from now I will be glad I did it. Instead I get the normal arrangement, which is that you make the best decision you can with the information available and then step forward without knowing exactly what happens next.

I got the shovel. I lifted the crow into it and there was a moment where it came to life – the fully spread left wing pulled into the center of the body involuntarily as it was released from the friction of the grass. I startled, then realized what happened (that it was still just a dead crow) and carried on. The body got unceremoniously dumped into what I think of as the way way back section of the yard, behind the last tree, right before the neighbor's property line starts. I half-assedly covered it with mulch and finished mowing the lawn. There was nothing else to do.

I keep thinking about that now.

The crow is not an omen. It is a dead crow in my backyard. Tomorrow is not a prophecy either. It is Tuesday and I am having shoulder surgery.

I can apparently understand all of these things perfectly well and still be afraid.

Tomorrow morning I will go with Jennie to the hospital. They will take me away from her for a little while and someone will give me drugs and I will disappear. Then, assuming the ordinary course of events, I will wake up confused and sore and probably complain about the sling and the pain and how badly I slept.

I would very much like to have those complaints.