No Time Like the Present to Think About Dying

As most people will attest to in these harried times, there is little time in any given day to think about much else beyond the crisis in front of you. Making deadlines, getting the kids to all their activities and homework, trying to get ahead at the office and having some semblance of a social life means we are spending far more time than ever trying to keep all the balls in the air.

Americans surpassed the rest of the world in 1999 for the longest work hours; Japan fell to second place that year.

And whoever said the Blackberry and other personal computing devices are work distractions has it all wrong. Those tiny little electronic demons have essentially anchored workers to their offices no matter where they are – the carpool line, a restaurant or the family vacation. They are not only addictive, but those contraptions keep us working 24/7.

Like most folks, I wish I had more time. There are lots and lots of things I’m not accomplishing in the course of a “normal” day; there are a ton of things I’d love to do…if I only had the time. There are the stacks of books on every flat surface in my home just waiting to be read. I’ve been meaning to learn Spanish for about seven years. There are plays I want to see, places I want to go, etc. etc.

But the one thing NOT on my list of things to do when I have more personal time is to draft a Do Not Resuscitate document for myself in the event of my incapacitation and near demise. Yes, that’s right I said a DNR order.

Frankly, I don’t think much about dying. I figure I will just give out one day and fall over onto my keyboard and that will be it. My co-workers will carry me out, maybe placing a stack of unread newspapers by me for the extra time I will have in the Hereafter.

My guess is many other people feel the same way I do about dying. When it’s your time, it’s your time. Boom. Gone. I believe this because when I hear people talk about dying, they say things, like, they want to go peacefully in their sleep. Wouldn’t we all!

You never really hear anyone wishing for death at the hand of a stranger in a dark alley, say, maybe by a painful gunshot wound to the stomach that makes him slowly bleed out.

Nope. Most of us have some idea of death based on movies – loved ones tearfully hanging over us while we pass into the Great Beyond. It should all happen very gracefully.

Last week, though, I had a taste of how death visits us unexpectedly and why taking the time now to prepare for the end might be worth it.

In what might go down in the annals of time as singularly the worst week of my life, just a few short days ago, I traveled out of state to seek a Power of Attorney for my father and sign his Do Not Resuscitate Order. Trust me when I say this is not how I saw my week going.

I will spare the details of how these circumstances came to be, but my father, who has Alzheimer’s disease, was recently placed in an assisted living facility. Without notice, I had to meet my youngish dad in an emergency room in Florida, figure out those crazy Parts A, B, C and D of Medicare, and sign his DNR.

I kept pushing that bright yellow DNR paper back across the table to my father’s caregivers, each time scheming up some new possible death scenario and asking the professionals if they would provide CPR or some other live saving technique and under my new contrived circumstances. While I sound rationale now, I didn’t feel rationale at the time. Giant tears rolled down my face, as I dealt with both legal and personal issues. I felt like I was signing my dad’s death warrant.

In calm, reassuring voices, the caregivers explained that my dad’s progressive disease would make a DNR a kind thing to do. Kind? For whom, I wondered. For crying out loud, this was my dad!

My father overcame the illness that placed him in the emergency room last week and a couple of days after the incident we sat quietly on the lawn of his new living facility watching some kids play baseball at the park next door.

I realized that my dad, a retired Bank of America VP and an Army veteran, never thought he would have Alzheimer’s. Dad was busy all his life. He had a plan, but the plan didn’t have a backup – and sometimes things turn out differently than we’d like them to.

In my wildest dreams I never thought I would be making these sorts of life and death decisions for one of my parents. I’ve been too busy to think about it, really.

But for those of you within reading distance, please do your loved ones a favor and be certain you have a living will in place – a legal document that empowers a person (and a backup!) to make decisions if there is ever a circumstance in your life that renders you incapable of doing if for yourself. And take some time to think through the circumstances under which you would rather not live. It’s easy to say “I don’t want to live hooked up to a machine,” but may be tougher to think about the more real-life scenarios in which you linger in some other way.

It’s never fun to think about death, but trust me on this one; it’s far easier to think through these issues for yourself than to ask the people who love you the most to make tough decisions when they’d rather be remembering early morning walks on beaches, learning how to throw a ball, lemon-filled donuts, planting rose gardens, long talks and how your smiles match.

Flowers is Editor-in-Chief of The Post.