Half showers are dangerous. Half showers are lazy showers. Half showers are for people like me who don’t want to go through all the effort of a full body shower when all they need is to, ahem, “freshen up”. (And please don’t look at me like my lady parts are so much smellier than yours after a day in yoga pants that you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Of course, taking off that ratty sweatshirt you’re wearing and putting your hair up so it doesn’t get wet doesn’t take all that much effort. Hence, the slothful tendencies of one like myself who once in awhile takes a half shower.

But this past winter I stopped half showers once and for all. While learning to live on my own again and poorly adjusting to the immense quietude and unbearable absence that filled my home after my separation, I took for granted one of the most important and practical benefits of marriage that I lost: someone to help you when you fall. Literally. Of course, marriage is supposed to be about companionship and conversation and the sharing of daily life. But at a more basic level, sometimes you just need someone to drive you to the hospital.

Not taking seriously the part of marriage that is about the immediate survival of the species I continued on as before, oblivious to the danger I was putting myself in. This included other risky solitary acts–like attacking the fire alarm at 2:45 because it suddenly needs you to know that the battery died and will make painful chirping noises until you acknowledge this fact. But because I didn’t have a ladder and I lived  in an old house with 12-foot ceilings the only way I could think of making that infernal sound stop involved stacking a desk chair on top of a massage table and hoping not to die. But after taking out the old battery, I realized I didn’t have a fresh 9V battery on hand. So I had to do it all over again the following day. And I spent the whole day while I was at work with the new battery in my purse quietly worrying that this would be the day that the house caught on fire but the alarm wouldn’t be able to warn anyone and everything would be destroyed and it would be all my fault. Because I didn’t have a ladder. Or foresight.

Luckily, I survived my Jenga-esque climb to the fire alarm. And I never fell in a state of half-naked disgrace in my bathtub. Though one day, standing naked from the waist down in my clawfoot tub, doing an awkward back-bend away from the spray so as to not get water on an old, weathered hoodie while my feet worked hard to keep their traction against the wet and soapy bathtub, I suddenly realized: I might fall. And then what?

The house suddenly felt very empty.

Death by bathtub happens hundreds of times a year. Apparently, I am as likely to die in a bathtub as I am at the hands of a terrorist, the chance of which is like 1 in 3.5 million. Extremely low odds on both counts. But still. It happens. Those terrifyingly quick turns in life that can devastate and destroy everything you thought you were until that moment. During my chaplaincy training, I met a man with severe brain and spinal cord injuries after he fell in his bathtub. It was not clear if he would ever be able to walk or talk again. I remember how innocuous a bathtub seemed to me until I walked into his room for the first time.

And yet, I still took half showers.

Until that day when I realized that if I fell in the bathtub just then that there would be no one to hear the thud, no one to check on me, no one to turn off the water if I broke my neck. I wondered how long I might lie there before someone figured out something was wrong. I imagined my body being discovered days later by the police who, in taking in the scene of how I died, would see my sweatshirt top and naked bottom and conclude the obvious: that I died because I was a lazy woman with a dirty hooha.

That humbled me.

And it scared me to realize how alone and vulnerable I was as I went about the simplest of tasks in my daily routine. Something penetrated my lazy thinking and enduring denial about death in that moment. Yes, it was an epiphany about what it meant to live alone again.  I could no longer afford the subconscious arrogance of believing I was safe simply because my husband was in the next room. It’s ridiculous, of course, to think that marriage can protect you from falling and dying in the bathtub or from the countless other awful ways we can die. But apparently, some part of me did think that very thing. And knowing this about myself was a revelation of the many small ways–some known, many more unknown–I am glibly handling, in the language of Buddhism, my one precious human life.

I still take showers just for the benefit of cleaning my genitalia. But now I take the time to do it properly. I get naked. I take full showers even when a half shower is all that’s needed because they are safer and I want to do whatever I can, within my power, to care for this one body that I’ve been given. But secondarily, I take full showers so if the unthinkable ever happens and I do happen to fall and hit my head and die in my bathtub after observing all the best safety precautions, then when the police find my body they will simply shake their heads and say: “What a tragedy. Bathtubs can be so dangerous.” But at least my coochie will be clean and free from a shameful postscript. And what they will say about tragedy will be true. I cannot protect myself from all of the unpredictable and accidental and terrible possibilities of ordinary life. But I hope to become better able to meet those realities with a greater sense of responsibility and care for my life within the boundaries that are mine to tend. No one else can do this for me. Married or not, I am alone in this task. This is my one precious life. No more half showers.