Traditionally, the “Day of the Dead” is a time when family and friends gather to remember friends and family members who have died. But it’s also a perfect time to think about your own death – if you dare.
Care to face your own mortality? Here are 10 Mind-Blowing questions to ponder about your own death.
Most people won’t go there because it’s either too scary, too painful, or we just pretend it will never happen to us. But ready or not, there’s a 100% certainty death will eventually get up close and personal with every one of us. Here, from MORTALLS – The Death-Positive Conversation Game, are 10 mind-blowing but worthwhile questions to ponder about your own death… if you are willing to do so:
What scares you the most about dying?
What are some not-so-scary things about dying that don’t really bother you?
When you die, would you rather be awake and aware, or sedated and oblivious? Why?
What would be the best thing about a quick death? The worst thing?
What do you think you will regret the most when you are dying?
What is something you want to be remembered for?
What is something you do not want to be remembered for?
Who will carry out your final wishes when you die? How will they know what those wishes are?
Does the certainty that you are going to die affect the way you live your life right now? If so, how? And if not, why not?
What three words would you use to describe your own attitude about death and dying?
Jennie Dear has an evocative piece for us examining the scant evidence that scientists have so far about the mysterious threshold between life and death—what the body goes through and how a person subjectively feels it, both in terms of pain and hallucinations:
“A lot of cardiac-arrest survivors describe that during their unconscious period, they have this amazing experience in their brain,” [neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin] says. “They see lights and then they describe the experience as ‘realer than real.’” She realized the sudden release of neurochemicals might help to explain this feeling. … Most of the patients interviewed [for a study at a hospice center], 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision.
One reader says of Dear’s ostensibly morbid piece (“What It Feels Like to Die”): “The article is comforting in a way I did not anticipate.” Another reader agrees:
I kissed my dad goodbye on the forehead right before he died. He smiled briefly. So, this article was some comfort in maybe explaining that smile of his.
This next reader also lost her father:
I remember when my dad was dying, and my mom forbade any of us from telling him that he was dying. I thought that that was terribly selfish on her part, and I told my husband that if I were dying I would want to know.
When my mom passed away, she was “treated” to the experience of my sisters bitterly arguing as to who was the favorite. (I knew I wasn’t and just held her hand.) My husband got my sisters to stop. Finally, the doctors came in and actually said she had permission to die … Mom was like that; you had to have permission in her mind for everything.
My dear husband is gone now, and I just hope that when I go, I’ll be thinking of him.
That reader’s line—“if I were dying I would want to know”—prompted a question in my mind I’ve long answered in the affirmative: “Do you want to be awake for your death and know it’s coming?” The conventional wisdom says most people prefer to die in their sleep, but, as long as there’s no intense pain involved, sleeping seems like a disappointing way to experience one of the most profound parts of life—it’s ending. And whenever I think of that question, I’m reminded of these lyrics from Björk’s “Hyperballad”:
I imagine what my body would sound like
Slamming against those rocks
And when it lands
Will my eyes be closed or open?
Would you rather be sleep or awake? How exactly would you prefer to die? What’s the ideal situation? Email hello@theatlantic.com if you’d like to share.
Back to a few more stories from readers regarding the death of a loved one. This memory is particularly poignant:
Twelve months ago, my 33-year-old daughter Phoebe began to die from metastatic melanoma. Over the next 10 weeks at a hospital in Melbourne, she went through each of the experiences outlined in Jennie Dear’s article. During this time, Phoebe asked her nurse how would she know when she was about to actually die. Donna told her that something would happen and she would know—both vague and oddly specific, but Phoebe was satisfied.
A week before her death, having gotten her pain under control, Phoebe was at home to say goodbye to her animals, clean out her cupboards, and give away her possessions. She was standing in the yard throwing a ball for the dog when she suddenly sat down, as I watched from the kitchen. I’m sure she realized as she collapsed to the bench that her time had come. I doubt that there could be a lonelier moment in a person’s life.
She didn’t speak again. Her hearing and hand gestures reduced over a few days to squeezing, then nothing but breathing quietly. Her brother-in-law, who was with her at the end, said she simply stopped breathing.
Each person’s death is different, so I found Dear’s article comforting in a way I did not anticipate.
One more reader for now:
My father was put into hospice, and all his meds were stopped. He “recovered” and lived another six months. After they “kicked him out” of hospice, he and I spent a lot of quality time together. When the end came, he was ready even though he could no longer speak. The hospice nurse came and looked at all the meds and found that while we still had the liquid morphine, we no longer had the Ativan, so we ordered a stat delivery from the pharmacist.
Giving morphine to a dying person can feel a lot like murder, and listening to the death rattle is more distressing than listening to a crying infant, but I think that the death experience is far worse for the person attending the death than for the one who is dying.
The Ativan was given to my father late in this process, but that was the drug which provided him with joy and relief. Shortly after he received the drug, I believe I witnessed him greeting his mother who had died 40 years ago.
My father then developed what is called a Cheyne-Stokes respiration; he would breath rapidly for a few minutes and then stop breathing. He resumed breathing like clockwork at 65 seconds from his previous breath. This lasted for hours. His last breath sounded much like a laugh, and I thought it was his way of saying good-bye.
I thought the event would be gruesome, but it was a special bonding experience which has helped me to reduce my fear of dying.
We all joke about dying one day, but when someone we love passes on it no longer becomes the punch line to a vulgar joke—instead the thought of death becomes a subtle pain that lingers within our heart for the rest of our lives.
Death is a scary concept. Not knowing if the next breath is our last, and if and when we will have enough time to say our goodbyes—that’s frightening.
Death has taken some of the most important people in my life too soon, but maybe death is not something to fear. Maybe death is a beautiful beginning; a fresh start where the people we cherish feel no pain and watch over us as we continue to live our everyday lives.
I am not saying that death is something to feel joyful about—it is okay to feel dejected; it’s okay to cry and mourn the loss of someone you loved. What I am saying is that maybe we are overlooking the positive aspect that stems from such a heart-rending event.
When someone is taken from us suddenly, we find ourselves stuck in a place of confusion and despair because life without them doesn’t seem plausible. I can’t help but think of one of the most common phrases that I’ve heard over and over again–“It is a shame, he or she was taken way too soon.” I found myself consumed with that phrase and was constantly questioning why some people died so young, why some people would suffer for years before passing, or why some people were blessed with a long healthy lifespan.
But maybe death is like a tragic love story—the outcome results in death, but the journey is trotted fearlessly by people who are adventurous and driven by the idea of living a full life despite their questionable duration on this Earth.
We spend so much time fearing death, when we really should fear not living.
Like Shakespeare said, everyone owes God one good death. We were put here with a purpose and with no indication of how long we will have. So why are we avoiding living our lives to the greatest extent when death is inevitable? Why are we so afraid to take that next step that can potentially alter the rest of our lives?
The truth of the matter is, death does not discriminate—it doesn’t matter what race you are, your gender, what your income is, or whether you are young or old. It doesn’t factor in whether you are compassionate, malicious, timid, or loud. It is because of this that death should not be dreaded, but should be the reason we live the life we have been given exactly the way we want to.
Maybe death exists so we realize just how precious our time is—death should not be viewed as this dark morbid being, but as a mysterious presence that pushes us to do the things that frighten us the most.
We don’t know when we will say our final words. We don’t know what we are going to be feeling the moment that life is taken away from us. So what has the death of my loved ones done to me? It has fueled me to take every opportunity that is put in front of me, and experience every moment like it is my last. So Death—the motivation to live a full life daringly before it brings you to your new beginning.
Nelly Gutierrez, 63, is among those featured in the exhibit and book “Right, before I die.” The Sylmar resident is living with several serious illnesses.
Five years ago, Nelly Gutierrez was devastated by the news that she would need to undergo dialysis for her failing kidneys three days a week for the rest of her life. The Sylmar resident, now 63, also suffers from heart and lung disease, she told the Journal. But it was her diabetes that had wrecked her kidneys and caused her body to swell painfully. A kidney transplant wasn’t a sure thing, and the three-hour dialysis sessions would leave her weak and uncomfortable.
After receiving her diagnosis, “I stopped taking my medications — I just wanted to die,” Gutierrez said in the text interview that accompanies her photograph in the exhibition “Right, before I die,” which will be on display at the Museum of Tolerance (MOT) from Aug. 15 through Sept. 30. “I cried every day and didn’t want to do anything anymore. I gave away all of my stuff.”
A year later, Gutierrez prayed to God for help as she struggled with wanting to end her life. Soon thereafter, she got the idea to volunteer at a senior center, working with elderly people also facing issues of life and death. The endeavor gave her own life meaning, even as her body continued to fail. “My joy is to see people smiling and to have the courage to go on with their lives,” she told the Journal.
Gutierrez is one of 20 patients profiled through photographs, text interviews and handwritten letters in Andrew George’s “Right, before I die”; she is the only one of his subjects still alive. In her portrait, she appears dignified and well dressed, with a bandage from a dialysis treatment peeking out from behind her blazer.
The subjects also include Sarah, who appears to be in her early 30s and is bald from chemotherapy yet smiling faintly. In her text interview, Sarah declares, “Time is so precious. God, it’s precious.”
Then there is Michael, a former junkie who went on to found eight Christian missions in Mexico, where he regularly provided food and supplies to the communities. “I can walk out of this earth with my head help up high and just go the way I came, naked,” he says in his interview.
Press materials for the exhibition note that the show is intended as a “counterpoint” to California’s End of Life Option Act, which went into effect on June 9. The law gives terminally ill patients diagnosed with six or fewer months to live who have the capacity to make medical decisions the right to seek a lethal prescription from a physician. Most Jewish groups have opposed the law because of the concept of pikuach nefesh — the mandate to protect human life.
“At its core, the exhibition speaks to the importance of human dignity, which is an essential theme of the Museum of Tolerance,” Liebe Geft, director of the MOT, said in an email.
Dr. Ira Byock, a leading expert in palliative and hospice care who has vociferously opposed doctor-assisted suicide, helped arrange for the exhibition to be sponsored by the Providence Institute for Human Caring, where he serves as chief medical officer. “This is our attempt … to open a window into the lived experience of illness and dying,” Byock said during an interview in his Torrance office. “What you find … when you look at these pictures and read some of the quotes is the surprising fact that, first, these people are living during the time that we would consider them to be dying. In addition to the struggles and the sadness and all of the challenges that death represents, this sense of well-being … is also possible.”
George, who supports the End of Life Option Act as a means to offer an additional choice to the terminally ill, was not considering politics when he set out to create his exhibition in around 2011. Rather, he was prompted to embark on the project after attending the funeral of a friend’s mother five years ago. “She was so loved by everyone, and I wondered, how do you create that effect during your lifetime?” George, whose studio is located in West Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview. “I thought this woman had figured something out that we can all learn from. So I wanted to make a project about people [like her].”
George chose to focus on seriously ill and dying patients who had overcome the fear of death and could impart a degree of wisdom about life. To find potential subjects, he approached officials at dozens of hospitals and hospices around Los Angeles, all of whom turned him down. But in 2012, Dr. Marwa Kilani at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center seemed to understand his goals and agreed to refer him to patients who displayed a particular kind of grit.
Photographer Andrew George is based in Los Angeles. His work has been in 18 international exhibitions, most recently at Musea Brugge in Belgium.
Whenever he heard from one of these patients, “I would drop everything and drive an hour to the hospital, sit with them for four or five hours and ask the 37 questions I had come up with,” George said. Those queries included, Do you have any regrets? What brings you joy? And do you experience love?
Yet George eschewed asking his interviewees to disclose their illnesses, religious background or past professions. “I wanted to cut through anything that might create a barrier between viewer and [subject],” he said.
To shoot the patients’ photographs, George used a medium format Hasselblad camera, “which captures every hair and imperfection,” he said. In his photographs, each person’s head is life-size, “so it’s like you’re looking through glass and actually viewing the person.”
The project wasn’t without challenges. “These people were often withered; they weren’t presenting the best of themselves,” George said. Further, as the photographer, he struggled to “find something beautiful” in the patients amidst the hospital’s fluorescent lighting and bland décor. “I strove to celebrate the soul of each individual,” he said. “In their own way, each of my subjects was enlightened.”
George and Byock — who traces his concern for the value of all humans to his Jewish background — will speak at the show’s opening reception at the MOT on Aug. 18.
“I’m going to talk about the importance of this cultural moment, in which the baby boomers have become the silver tsunami,” Byock said. “In our culture, we are living with people who are older than ever before in human history.
“So many people are living quite well, and often for many years with diseases that would have killed them [in previous generations]. Yet culturally, we have not developed to make full use of these unprecedented changes. … This exhibition is another opportunity for us to grow the rest of the way up.”
Chiara Micheletti helps her mother Marisa Vesco take a shower in Cossato, Italy, June 7, 2015.
My grandmother’s life and mine overlapped for 27 years. I always called her “Nonna.”
Our age difference and profoundly contrasting values and way of thinking did not prevent us from developing a strong bond and a relationship punctuated by mischievous games and moments of tenderness and humour. We were amused by our differences.
“You know, I was still young when you were born,” she told me a few weeks before she died. “It’s a little like we grew up together.”
At a lunch table a few months earlier in Milan, I learned from my mother, her daughter, that Nonna, 85, suffered from incurable liver cancer. Years before, she had already survived two bouts of breast cancer.
Nonna would tell me time and time again that the news of my birth had given her the strength to fight.
When I learned that she was sick again, I had just landed in Italy, where I would be for only three days before flying back to New York.
Even more heartbreaking than the fear of saying goodbye to her was the fact that my grandmother did not know how sick she was. My mother and aunt believed she could not bear the thought of a third bout with cancer, this time, affecting her liver. Nonna was told by family members that her liver was ill.
No one ever mentioned the word “cancer.”
Because of this, one question haunted us until the day she died: Did we have the right to know the truth about her condition when she did not?
Marisa Vesco embraces her nephew Luca Squarci.
Nonna spent most of her last months at home, surrounded by family. She reconciled with the idea of death and said she could slowly feel it coming.
Doctors felt that surgery and chemotherapy would be pointless.
In the midst of all this, I realised my mother was losing her mother.
After moving back to Italy for a few months, I witnessed the range of my mother’s emotions and the energy she devoted to the time they had left together.
Nonna’s world shrank to a few walls and fewer streets. In this narrow existence, every detail and daily act took on deeper meaning.
One of the things my mother treasured most was giving her mother a bath. She did not hesitate to touch her old body, and she did not want others to do it on her behalf.
I joined my mother and grandmother in the bathroom to quietly observe them with my camera.
As I experienced those precious moments, I imagined myself at an older age and thought about how time changes one’s perspective on being a woman.
As my grandmother faced my lens, completely naked, her body bearing the signs of past and present illnesses, she did not show the slightest bit of shame – only trust and pride.
If you spoke with people in Nonna’s town they would say she never left the house without being enveloped in a cloud of perfume, her white hair perfectly coiffed and her face tinged with makeup.
I was surprised by the way she confronted being ill without losing her femininity. She was able to poke fun at herself. More than once she asked me, “Am I going to end up on Vogue or Marie Claire?”
On Oct. 11, 2015, the day Nonna died in Biella, Italy, I was across the world in Brooklyn, New York. I had spent five months with her, celebrating her life instead of mourning her death.
I remember taking a walk through the Greenpoint neighbourhood of Brooklyn and staring for a while at kids competing in a race. I was unable to come to terms with the fact she was no longer a part of the world around me.
I struggled with the concept of death and the abstract emotion we call grief. I found peace only when I returned to Italy to spread Nonna’s ashes.
My family and I walked to Nonna’s favourite place in the mountains not far from Cossato in northwestern Italy, the town in which she had grown up.
Her ashes felt heavy in my hands. I threw them far up into the air, and they fell all over the grass, and all over me. My mother, brother and aunt did the same, again and again.
In the end, we were covered in Nonna’s ashes and so was the field around us.
Months later, my mother sent me a photograph of that field. It was completely covered in flowers.
‘Cohen’s economy of words, the syntax of love, his ability to go straight to the only matter that matters – her death, his mortality, their love – is a thing of beauty and wisdom.’
The songwriter’s letter to Marianne Ihlen in her last hours was beautiful, poetic and to the point. Yet so often we deal with death in an inane, mawkish way
A short goodbye. A few sentences. But words of such clarity, simplicity and beauty. Many of us have by now read Leonard Cohen’s letter to a woman he once loved, Marianne Ihlen, on her deathbed – and those who didn’t know it already have seen that Cohen is a class act, a man you don’t meet every day.
He heard that she was dying and two hours later he wrote to her that he too was old and his body failing. He had, of course, written for her before, with the lyrics of So Long, Marianne and Bird on the Wire. This time he told her: “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”
Slipping into unconsciousness, her friend said that Marianne did reach out her hand. Cohen’s letter also stated that he didn’t need to talk about her beauty and her wisdom, “because you know all about that”. The 10 years they were together on and off, their intimacies, their passions, their endings, those – despite the songs – are all a part of their own personal story. Now he wishes her endless love on her journey – to death. It is everyone’s journey, but few speak so directly of it, not even while whispering in the waiting rooms.
Was Marianne his greatest muse? What does it matter? He loved her for a while. He loved his four bottles of wine a day before he took himself off to the Buddhist monastery where he was given the Dharma name of Jikan which means “silence”. But he knows about silence as he also knows about the tower of song.
Death is so often met with silence or with sentiments that are an inane babble to fill a void. The mawkish inscriptions and epitaphs seek to cauterise the grief, to fix it for a while. For how to write of loss? How do you write to a person you will never see again? I have done it, clumsily, inelegantly, with false jauntiness and then a wish for them to rest. Whatever that means.
So Cohen’s economy of words, the syntax of love, his ability to go straight to the only matter that matters – her death, his mortality, their love – is a thing of beauty and wisdom in itself. His ever deepening voice, the self-mockery, to see him now deadpan and dapper is still quite something. But once she held him like a crucifix and he let her go: “I’m cold as a new razor blade,” he sang.
Some think of him as a doom-monger but he is deadly funny and the faith was always there. “I think I was touched as a child by the music and the kind of charged speech I heard in the synagogue, where everything is important,” he said in his eighth decade, adding ironically that he was singing “a lot of Jew-sounding songs in different keys”.
Yet it is the fact that his words are so charged that is the reason they touch us. In my local park, there is an inscription on a bench for a friend who died and the words are taken from So Long, Marianne: “It’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
Cohen once said: “Poetry is just the evidence of your life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” What ash though? Warm, sacred, dancing us to the end of love; young passions, old bodies, a rare and gracious farewell. So long, Marianne. Thank you, Mr Cohen.
Last Sunday, 07/24, I woke up feeling a bit wonky. Couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was feelin’ out of sorts; I just was. But I had a swell outing planned for the day, so I couldn’t flake. A couple of friends and I were planning on taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island for lunch. The weather was perfect for our little cruise across Puget Sound.
My friends and I met at Pikes Market, a famous landmark here in The Emerald City, and we walked to the ferry from there. I walk about four miles every day so the 15-minute walk should have been a breeze for me. But something was wrong. I felt lethargic and winded.
The 35-minute ferry ride was magical, as always, but upon disembarking and walking to the restaurant I began to really hurt. Not one to spoil the fun I marshaled my resources and made it to lunch.
The walk back to the ferry was excruciating. I was lightheaded, slightly nauseous, and completely winded. My heart was pounding like it wanted out of my chest. My companions became as worried as I was.
Once we docked in Seattle I had to once again disembark then walk to public transportation and to home. I was in a panic. The crush of the crowd around added to my distress. I thought for sure I was gonna faint, or barf, or worse. I was certain that my lungs were gonna give out on me. After many stops to catch my breath and buckets of sweat from the effort I finally made it home.
I’ve been monitoring my blood pressure for several months. (Ya gotta do this when you’re old, like me.) So once at home, I took a reading. My blood pressure was normal, but my pulse was unusually low, a reading of 49 to be precise. A couple of hours later it was 45. This was odd. I had never experienced anything like that before. Mostly my pulse rate hovers in the upper 70s and low 80s.
I felt much better on Monday. But come Tuesday, I was a total wreck. The least bit of exertion left me exhausted and prostrate. I knew it; my lungs were finally giving out. I put in a call to my doctor and got an expedited appointment for the very next day.
Tuesday’s blood pressure readings were slightly elevated, which was great, but my pulse was way down. I took several readings and each was in the mid 30s never over 40. I still didn’t get it. (This is probably why I’m not a brain surgeon.)
Wednesday turned out to be a nightmare. Unbeknownst to me I was about to began a headlong descent into the maw of the medical industry.
My doctor’s appointment was at 10:30am. The doc took one look at me and ordered an electrocardiogram (EKG). “HOLY SHIT!” She exclaimed. (Or something to that effect.) “How is it that you’re still standing?”
Needless to say, this got my attention right quick. “What?” I inquired. “Although you are not having a heart attack you are this close to the pearly gates. Your pulse is about to flat line, you monkey!” My doctor stuttered. (Ok, maybe she didn’t mention the pearly gates, or call me a monkey, but that was her drift for damn sure.)
Maybe it was the stress or shock of it, but I started to laugh. My doctor asked; “What’s so funny?” I said; “Did you ever see the movie, Death Becomes Her? Remember the scene in the emergency room?”
She gave a faint smile and said; “Yeah, I get it, but this is no laughing matter. Get thee to the Emergency Room ASAP!”
Off I went.
I got to Swedish Hospital (First Hill) Emergency Reception just before noon. The guy behind the desk asked what was wrong with me. I said; “Basically, I’m having a heart attack.” Apparently those are the magic words because the team swung into action. I was admitted immediately, blood was drawn, another EKG, x-rays were taken, and I was hooked up to a heart monitor. Diagnosis: Bradycardia with second-degree heart block.
You need a pacemaker IMMEDIATELY!
We’ll get you a room on the cardiac ward at our Cherry Hill campus, which is just a mile away, as soon as one is available.”
“Oh, OK, I guess,” said I as the severity of the situation finally began to dawn on me. As you can see, I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box.
Back in the emergency room I was laying on a gurney with electrodes and wires sprouting from my chest and back. I lay there for hours listening to the cries, screams, and moans of my fellow emergency patients. Codes blue and grey are being called with regularity and I can just imagine the human misery that surrounds me.
At 5:00pm one of the emergency nurses tells me that a room at the cardiac ward will be available at 7:00pm. “But, 7:00pm is the changing of the shift. So the soonest we could get you there is 7:30pm.”
7:30pm comes and goes. “What’s up?” I ask. “We’re trying to locate transport for you.” Was their retort. “But the Cherry Hill campus is just a mile away. I could walk there from here.” I countered. “But you need a special ambulance, one with a nurse on board, one that can monitor your heart in transit.” “You gotta be kidding!” Said I. “Not at all. You could flat line on the way to Cherry Hill and we’d be liable. Don’t worry, Richard, we will surely have the transport by 10:00pm.”
The transport didn’t actually arrive till 12:30am. That was twelve and a half hours on a gurney in the ER! And the fun is just beginning.
I finally get to the Cherry Hill campus at 1:00am. I am ushered into a room where I am then interrogated for 45 minutes. (Are you now, or have you ever been…) They called it an intake, but a rose by any other name. I haven’t eaten since breakfast at 5:00am the previous day with only water to drink. Now, even the water was being withheld. I guess they anticipated I would have my procedure later that (Thursday) morning.
Not so fast there buckaroo!
Thursday dawns, but nothing happens. I’m confined to my bed (the second worse bed in the world. The first being the ER gurney I left yesterday) and am attached to a heart monitor. I am faint from hunger and more than a little dehydrated. By noon they decide they need to feed me lest the hunger and dehydration kill me before the arrhythmia.
I scarfed down my lunch like a dying man…mostly because I was.
Allow me to pause my narration for a moment and comment on the cardiac nursing staff. They are superb! And even that superlative leaves me wanting. These women are freakin’ rock stars in my book. One in particular, Nurse Jen, totally got me. We both had the same gallows humor. She is my hero.
Eric Williams, MD, FHRS
Late Thursday afternoon Dr. Williams, a cardiac electrophysiologist, saunters into my room. He’s gonna be doing the cutting on me. He is a tall handsome black man with the most unassuming manner. He looks me in the eye and talks to me like I’m a human. I’m super impressed with his bedside manner. He tells me my blood work and enzymes are excellent. My x-rays show that my heart isn’t enlarged. (But wait! Every one tells me I have a huge heart.) And there’s no sign that I had a heart attack. We talk about the pacemaker and the procedure. He tells me it’s about the size of a silver dollar. (When I actually see the blasted thing the next day, just before they shove into my chest, I have to wonder where Dr. Williams gets his silver dollars.) The procedure is very routine; he tells me. “Yeah sure, for you maybe.” It’ll last approximately 45 minutes, during which I will be enjoying twilight anesthesia. “Twilight anesthesia, huh? That sounds delightful.” Better living through chemistry, I always say.
I get a sedative Thursday night to help me sleep in my little bed of torture. And nothing by mouth after midnight. (Oh no! Not that again.)
Friday morning my nurses prep me for surgery. First, they have to shave my manly chest, don’t cha know. Nurse Jen takes the lead with a maniacal gleam in her eye. This is more than a little awkward and also maybe a wee bit kinky.
Finally the fateful hour arrives. I get a second IV stent, because apparently one is not enough for these folks. Then I’m wheeled down to the bowels of the building where I disappear into one of the surgery suits.
Does this look like the size of a silver dollar? I don’t think so.
Two hours later I’m back in my room dopey as all get-out, but still kickin’.
I’m home now, i’m happy to report. They liberated me on Saturday, 07/30, afternoon. And I am only slightly worse for the wear. I have a very distinctive slash across my left pectoral. There’s an unsightly bulge just below it. It looks like i’m growing a third breast. And a nasty purple and brown bruise that runs from my shoulder to my sternum and from my collarbone to my nipple. I sound like a real attractive guy, huh?
The Moral Of The Story
My friends, life is short! Ought we not live every day like it’s our last? I think so. I have decided that I will try to be more kind to myself and those around me. Because, ya know what? In a twinkling of an eye, it can and most assuredly be over.
