Life is a curious thing. It can come from a five minute drunken passion or a five year long battle of treatments and hope. Life is precious and pure. It takes effort and time to sculpt and, while we all experience it for the first time, we try our hardest to do it right. To not waste precious second that, at the end, seem so few.

So when I found out how easy, and how quickly it was that said life could end, I was shocked.

With one peanut butter chocolate, this man’s life was over. Fifty-eight long years of build up to this anticlimactic, arguably embarrassing, end. Not that I felt sorry for him, in the end, it wasn’t my fault he stole my lunch again and again.

It wasn’t my fault I overheard about a certain deadly allergy while walking through the halls last night.

And it wasn’t my fault I put non descript chocolate cookies in my lunch.

I’d watch him take it through the half glass walls of the break room, and watched as he took a bite of my carefully crafted treat. I saw him claw at his throat, and eventually heard a thud as a two hundred pound weight hit the floor of the break room.

Of course, I was shocked when the secretary walked in the room later that day. And I was shocked when he screamed seeing the dead boss blue faced on the ground.

Police took statements, and I was sent home early along with the rest of my crew.

Once safe inside the walls, I callled out to my husband. He narrowed his eyes, and laughed nervously.

An hour and a quick panicked conversation later, we were in the car driving north to reach the Maple flagged country twenty hours away.