Death and genetics

Each of my parents dropped dead on the spot. That this should happen to both of them is so improbable as to defy the calculation of odds.

With mother, it happened in the lobby of a hospital while she was being checked out for a minor operation unrelated to her death. Dad was writing a check, and she was waiting nearby. Suddenly she dropped the floor, dead. I was living on Maryland's Eastern Shore and was shocked by the news. Everyone assumed Dad would die first.

Dad's death was even more shocking since I was there. I've written about this in my essay, The Weight of My Father's Soul. The short of it is that he, too, dropped dead on the spot, at a New Jersey friend's house on the eve of our departure together to resettle him in Oregon so he could be closer to his two sons.

Neither parent had complaints or symptoms before they dropped dead. Indeed, each expressed well-being, mom to be getting out of the hospital, dad to getting his affairs in N.J. settled. Then, boom. On the floor, dead.

What are the odds of this happening to both parents? Naturally it brings to mind the possibility of some jinxed DNA configuration, some family curse, something to explain the unexplainable.

So I wonder if I, too, will drop dead on the spot. Although there are far worse ways to die, and this mode is worse for the living than the dead, I would hate to die before I finish the Cold War novel, and the Sally novel after that, and the rest home stories after that, and my experiments in music drama after that ... in other words, I'm probably going to die, however it goes, while in the middle of something I'd prefer to finish. Comes with the territory of being a writer, at least a prolific one.

The worst deaths are the long, bed-ridden, drawn-out ones. Ideally, I would like to be diagnosed with an incurable, inoperable disease with only months to live. Time to do some things and think about some things and write some things and see some people to say some things. But we seldom get what we wish for in this particular arena of life. There's only one way to choose our death, which always is an option though not one of interest to me as long as I am "in the middle of something." If I dry up into a senile vegetable, maybe it's time to look at the option again.

If it's so highly improbably that both parents drop dead, it's even more improbable that three in the same family do so. So I probably won't drop dead. That's fine by me. I have things to write, read, do. Onward.