A death in the family

After the service, join us in the fellowship hall for low-fat refreshments

It’s a terrible moment when the doctor removes his glasses and lowers his face and wipes his eyes and says, “We did all we could.”

You know you’re going to have to go forward and learn to live life without that person.

But when it’s the refrigerator doctor, it’s even worse. Because you can’t just learn to live life without that fridge. There are no fridge widows. You have to get another fridge.

I shouldn’t complain that my fridge died. The refrigerator repairman said that he typically gives last rites to this model of refrigerator at the 7- or 8-year mark. Mine lasted 13.

Sure, it began groaning several years ago, occasionally shuddering, sometimes coughing, whining, buzzing, or even clattering. Yet through it all, no matter how ill it may have felt, it served faithfully and well. Swing the door, the light comes on, the Coke is cold, the veggies are crisp and fresh.

All those years, I never once opened the fridge to feel that disturbing rush of room-temperature air and the nauseating stench of spoiled thin-sliced boneless skinless chicken breasts that you got on sale for $4.99.

Why now?

Maybe I sinned and I’m being punished, or maybe it’s just bad luck, but whatever the backstory, I seem to have entered a season of loss, a vortex of sorrows. A collapsing garage, a crashed car, a failed septic system, my first-ever pickleball injury — don’t worry, I’ll be okay — and now a dead fridge.

Each item on the list, of course, can be easily remedied with some variation on the phrase “thousands of dollars.” Except for the pickleball injury, which required no stitches, and my tooth appears to be growing back.

It’s no small thing to send a fridge-corpse packing. Of course you must evacuate the curdled milk and withered red bell peppers and all the other innards. But then there’s the exterior. After 13 years, the outside of a fridge is like a museum of inanities.

·  You have to pull off innumerable photos, including school pictures of the children of the people you used to live next-door to but can’t remember the names of.

·  A magnetic chip-clip but whatever it used to be holding is long gone.

·  A photo of that auntie in Michigan that you’d feel guilty chucking into the trash; I mean the photo, not the auntie. (Although chucking the auntie, would you really feel all that much guiltier?)

·  There’s a magnet from a place you’re almost certain you never visited.

·  Something someone sent you that had a magnet on the back so why not put it on the fridge?

·  A postcard reminder to attend a show that closed in April.

·  Inexplicably, an entire miniature ceramic Greek salad painted in full color and bearing the inscription GREEK SALAD.

·  A coupon, expired.

·  A huge postcard from the Town of Ipswich with 150+ square inches of recycling and trash information, so heavy it requires two magnets, top and bottom, to keep it mounted to the fridge.

·  The latest grocery list — because of course your grocery list goes on the fridge.

·  And other stuff, some of it too embarrassing to mention.

Once you’ve cleared the front and sides of the fridge, you realize there’s another hodgepodge of hooey on the top. It’s like an archeological dig, excavating all those long-lost treasures.

·  A box of matches swathed in cobwebs.

·  A letter opener. Another letter opener.

·  A wallet. (Why?)

·  That little thingy they gave you at that thing you went to.

·  Oh, and from that party you threw that you’d rather forget, the leftover plastic champagne glasses, nested in a neat stack and lying on their side like the stiffened corpse of a proper French soldier.

But the most disturbing part of refrigerator death is that it forces you to confront your own gross consumption habits.

Once you’ve emptied it out, it’s disturbing to see that cavernous space: a mammoth storage zone dedicated to calories, carbs, cholesterol — a holy place of confections, cold cuts, condiments, all committed to the convenient countering of every craving.

Why own such an enormous cold-storage monster? Well, when I bought it 13 years ago, I had a little kid in the house. A manic parent like me wants to make sure the child is provided for. The only way to be sure she has ketchup is to keep two ketchups on hand, in case heaven forbid one bottle runs empty mid-hotdog. At which point you’re down to one ketchup, so you’re at risk again.

And what if you forget to replace the emptied ketchup the next time you’re at the grocery store? Better get a third, just to make sure you’re covered.

And don’t forget the multiple mustards, redundant relishes. Only one onion? Is that enough?

I was the obsessive Superdad, living in America, the land of bounty, so I stored stuff by the ton. The fridge was like a bunker, 32 cubic feet of gear for surviving parenthood.

But those days are long gone. This is a quiet seniors-only spot now. No more using the kid as an excuse.

The discomfiting truth is, I live a scant four minutes from a huge grocery store. In fact, if they’re closed and I’m desperate for a Slim Jim, Cumby’s is about 90 seconds down the road.

Yet for years I have packed a plentitude of perishables in a colossal metal box in my kitchen — for what?

So it was time for something more reasonable.

The new fridge holds more than enough foodstuffs to keep me alive till the next grocery run; but it’s no deeper than the kitchen counter, and skinny. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get skinny too.

Right after I polish off this gallon of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby.