Phoning Home: Essays

Sudden Death—A Eulogy

Sudden Death—A Eulogy My great-grandfather Simon Litman, Latvian immigrant, secular Jew, inept businessman, gifted egg candler, doting father, cigar smoker, and pint-sized omnivore who (at least in family lore) could devour his own body weight in gribenes, holds the distinction of being the last of my forebears to drop dead. He made his dramatic exit on a balmy spring evening in 1950, strolling home with his wife from a Saturday supper at my grandmother’s house in St. Albans, Queens. At the dinner table, he’d appeared in good health and good cheer. Nevertheless several blocks up the avenue, opposite a fire station , he told my great-grandmother, “I don’t feel so good,” then clutched one hand to his chest, fell to his knees, and stopped breathing. He was sixty years old. To this day my ninety-one-year-old grandmother remains livid that none of the firemen responded to her mother’s cries for help. “They Sudden Death—A Eulogy 63 must have heard her,” she says. “How could they not have heard her?” Of course, that was before defibrillators and vasopressors, an era when dropping dead was a natural part of life. If the entire fire department had arrived en masse with paramedics in tow, they’d have had nothing therapeutic to offer. Six decades after Great-Grandpa Simon plunged off his mortal coil, sudden death now threatens to go the way of rotary telephones and passenger pigeons. The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate. While the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, I’d hazard a guess that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients stayed in the hospital only for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering on our mortal coil is the norm. Your insurance company—not rigor mortis—forces you out of the hospital. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven— the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang. 64 Phoning Home That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical-school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties . But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene. Increasingly our first associations with “sudden death” are metaphorical. “Sudden death” terminates ice hockey games and World Cup matches, not the lives of our friends and relatives . Blair’s, the condiment enterprise, has transformed “sudden death” into a flavor of hot sauce; music impresario Joey Keithley co-opted it for a punk record label. Some time ago I had the pleasure of seeing the singer Molly Hager in concert, a woman who embodies my—and many other men’s—epitome of feminine beauty, and I made the mistake of observing to my date that Ms. Hager was “drop-dead gorgeous.” My date replied, acidly, “in that case, keep staring.” Needless to say, as forcefully as I ogled, my heart beat only faster; it did not stop. “Drop-dead gorgeous,” of course, means far less in a world where people don’t actually drop dead. (Insert a comma between “dead” and “gorgeous,” and it sounds like a threat Humphrey Bogart might have served up to Lauren Bacall during a...