It is now nearly a decade since the sunny February morning when two orderlies arrived to wheel my husband of thirty-three years into the operating theater where he had a routine prostatectomy from which he never recovered. Though he was in robust health apart from the tumor for which he was being treated, Elliot died some six hours after my children and I were told that his surgeon had successfully removed the malignancy. But to this day, no one from the hospital has explained to us how or why he died, leaving us with a puzzle that would be tormenting to any family but that is particularly unnerving considering that the hospital isassociated with the university whose English department my husband chaired and on whose campus I still teach. So as Ruth Stone puts it about the mysterious death of her husband nearly a quarter of a century ago," I am still at the same subject, lShredding facts."" Dad's had a heart attack." That was the explanation my husband's doctor offered us as he strode grimly into the hospital lobby on the night of February II, 1991. But the next day the medical center released adifferent story, alleging that the cause of death was" heart failure." And two weeks later, a death certificate signed by the chiefresident who worked with my husband's physician gave still another account, asserting that death resulted from" liver failure." Through painful investigation-first with the help of a close friend who is a pathologist, then with the aid of an attorney-we discovered that my husband had suffered a massive post-operative internal hemorrhage. In fact, he evidently bled to death because someone in the recovery room failed to get the results ofa hematocrit, a simple test that would have detected the problem. Eventually, we filed suit for negligence-and our lawyer won a settlement just two days after he deposed the attending surgeon. Although, as in most settlements, the hospital admits no guilt, my husband had clearly been the victim of what researchers call a" negligent adverse event": an event defined by