This is the first time I have spent long stretches imagining my own death. Usually, the death pass is a perfect thirty-yard spiral. This death daydream takes place in a blinding blizzard in a game that I lose. In this one, I imagine being sick for a while and then developing a hacking cough and then getting pneumonia and then dying. This is an awful death simulation.
I feel like I am O.K. with some versions of my own death. Like, maybe I go for a nice long walk, then I have dinner with my wife and daughter, maybe a phone call with an old college friend, and then a meteor hits the earth. Sign me up for that death. Or maybe this: I take a guitar lesson with Paul Simon. He teaches me “The Boxer” and then, for no justifiable reason, I play the song perfectly—like, better than Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park in ’81—and after I play the final note Paul looks over at me and says, “That was really good, Mike.” And then the building explodes. So obviously, in that scenario, we both die instantly and the headline reads, “Paul Simon and Unknown Comedian Die After Perfect Jam Session.”
There is one last death scenario I’d be O.K. with. To recap, so far it’s:
1. Dinner with my family and then a meteor.
2. Simon & Birbiglia followed by explosion.
The third and final death scenario I’m O.K. with is my wife and daughter and I go to the beach and have a bonfire, which is prepared by bonfire professionals who make sure it’s not too hot but perfect for s’mores. And we make s’mores—no, wait, that’s after we make a bonfire pizza, with dough flown in from Frank Pepe’s, in New Haven. So we do pizza then s’mores and then my wife leans over to me—privately, because our daughter is only five—and she says, “If anything ever happened to you, I want you to know that we would be O.K. and that you’ve given us more than we could hope for in three lifetimes. So, God forbid anything happens—we will be fine.”
And then I say, “I love you both.”
And I walk into the water and am eaten by a shark. Quickly. The key there is “quickly.” And the headline reads, “Unknown Comedian Killed by Shark After He Kills with Thousands of Audience Members.”
Those are the ways I’m O.K. dying. But, these days, it’s much grimmer than that. It’s hacking coughs and scorching fevers and ventilators and intubations and people sharing their final words with their families through a bad connection on a cell phone.
So my only remaining hope in this terrible simulation is that, if I find myself in a hospital, hooked up to a ventilator that is about to be taken from me—that I will be aided by an adequate amount of medical delirium to actually believe that the last thing I see is Paul Simon, leaning over to say, “Mike, you played that final note perfectly.”
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Some Ways That I’m O.K. Dying - The New Yorker
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