How to ruin a perfect death

A few months ago, the local fire department offered a free CPR training. Great, I thought, I could save a life! And I signed right up. The training lasted about an hour, during which we trainees were told that to save a person’s life, we might have to press the person’s chest hard enough to break some ribs—but not to worry, that’s O.K. And the technique can be used on anyone a year of age or older. 

 I had thought the training would increase my confidence in navigating the world. No longer would I risk being a helpless bystander in the face of tragedy. I could save the day.

 But the result was weeks of nightmares. I thought of my late father-in-law Jack. He was beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s, but otherwise he seemed in good health. On the last day of his life, he worked in his garden, played a game of singles with an old friend, had a stiff drink, then sat down to a lovely stir-fry prepared by his wife of 60-odd years. After a few bites, he fell face-down into his dinner plate. When the EMTs arrived a few minutes later, they pronounced him dead.

 Everyone marveled at what a perfect death it was. All the earthly pleasures an upper-middle-class gentleman could desire, followed by a quick and painless heart attack. His papers were in order—had been for years—even detailed instructions on his memorial service’s scheduling (first Saturday post-mortem), guest list (25 names), and menu, including drinks. It should be a party. And it was! His friends counted him lucky to have died the way he did, and they toasted his good fortune.

 If I knew then what I know now and I was present for his last dinner, I could have ruined that good death. I could have broken his ribs, caused him horrible pain, only to prolong his descent into helplessness and dementia.

 And let’s not even start with breaking little babies’ ribs!

 I wish I'd never taken the damned course.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Early days

It's been like the first days of a school year—with clothes that feel starchy and bright, and careful courtesy to and from the teacher.  There are no fingerprints on the walls of our new apartment, and we are fastidious about returning our belongings to their places and sponging up spills and fixing small breakages. We wear bright, somewhat artificial smiles to greet our super and doormen and neighbors. We are nice to the max. It feels a little phony, but we want to start off on the right foot. Or the left foot. Or whatever foot everyone else uses. We want to march in sweet synchrony.  There are moments of euphoria as Other and I remark to each other on the profound silence, which continues to stun us two months after leaving the cacophany of NoHo. I sometimes wonder if anyone else actually lives here, it's so quiet in the wee hours—no 3 a.m. revelers screeching beneath our window, no drunken cell-phone breakups broadcast into our bedroom, no bass beats booming through...
Read more

Like Downton Abbey but different

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...
Read more

I feel your pain--and everyone else's too

Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis...
Read more