No Right To a Good Death in the Land Of the Free
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
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My uncle died of COVID-19 this weekend. He was a pastor, a father, a grandpa, a goofy and kind man with an endless supply of dad jokes. He meant a lot to a lot of people. I don’t know if he was vaccinated, but the numbers say probably not. My grandparents had nine children; this will be the sixth my grandfather has had to bury.
When I think about Dean’s dizzying last days –– hospitalization, intubation, ventilator, multiple-systems failure, cardiac arrest –– I long for grief, unadulterated. Simple sorrow would be a relief. But instead, I am hollowed out with impotent fury: What a shitty way to die. I want to reach back in time and re-write that entire ending. I hate bad endings.
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I think about dying, a lot. My dad, Dean’s big brother, died when I was ten months old –– crushed unceremoniously between a truck and the wall of a garage. Later, family members would tell me that my two-year-old brother and I were in the cab. That the three of us were there, together, for nearly an hour before someone found us.
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In high school, I often went snooping through the fire-proof lockbox my mom kept hidden in the back corner of her bedroom closet. I liked to take Danny’s massive wedding ring from the box and spin it on my thumb, imagine what he must have been like. One day, I noticed something I hadn’t before. An envelope; police photos.
I slid the pictures from the paper and struggled to comprehend the scene: the weird angle of Danny’s body, his feet lifted artlessly from the ground, his arm pinned to his chest by the truck, his mouth tinged blue and set all crooked like a silly accident. I stared dumbly at his dead twenty-six-year-old face, which I couldn’t remember alive.
How embarrassing, I thought –– to be caught off guard by death like that. How absurd, the way some clumsy policeman got the blurry edge of his own thumb in the frame. How stupid, that I always believed my father’s death was ordained, special; that I ever thought it meant anything at all.
I closed my eyes; tried to unsee it.
...
On an unremarkable Monday last March, one year into the pandemic, a man emptied his gun into the soft bodies of afternoon shoppers at a grocery store just down the road from my house.
Ten people dead, the news declared. Ten, to add to the thousands and hundreds of thousands most of us had already stopped counting. “58 Minutes of Terror,” reported the Denver Post. Or, “Roughly Our Collective Attention Span for Processing Preventable Tragedies At This Point.”
I know I’m supposed to be over it by now, to move through my grief for dead strangers at the clip of a news cycle, like a patriotic American.
But scenes I never saw that day still trouble me. I’m sure they are captured forever on a police roll somewhere: the mouths just blue, the glassy eyes staring blindly across cheap industrial linoleum, the final frozen surprise at the indignity of a shitty death in a King Soopers produce aisle.
And I can see clearly how unbearably stupid all of this is. How anemic our “inalienable right to life” becomes, when we won’t fight for better deaths for our countrymen. How complacently we accept bad endings to the only stories we will ever get. I close my eyes, but I can’t unsee it.