Sudden death

Jacob M. Appel writes a eulogy for sudden death.

"Six decades after Great-Grandpa Simon plunged off his mortal coil, sudden death now threatens to go the way of rotary telephones and passenger pigeons. The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

Increasingly, our first associations with “sudden death” are metaphorical. “Sudden death” terminates ice hockey games and World Cup matches, not the lives of our friends and relatives. ..We can speak figuratively about sudden death, trivialize it—even joke about it—because we do not actually expect to confront it. Not now, not soon, not until we’ve been afforded ample time to prepare. And with each new medical innovation, the odds are more likely that we won’t.

My own family doctor has a sign on his office door that reads: “Sudden death is God’s way of telling you to slow down.” If that is indeed the case, God has been letting us accelerate with impunity for some time now.

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society reminded Americans that, for the first time in human history, we lived in a civilization where a majority of people did not have to worry about basic subsistence. More than five decades later, we find ourselves belonging to the first human civilization where sudden death is the glaring exception, not the expectation. The novelty of our position is all too easy to forget; it is even easier to assume without questioning that the present state of affairs reflects progress. After all, which of us wouldn’t rather die well-prepared at ninety than suddenly at fifty-five?

And yet, the more I see of death, the less convinced I become that, in this medical and social revolution, we have not lost something of considerable value. I certainly don’t mean to glorify premature death: I suspect both “dying with one’s boots on” and “living fast, loving hard and dying young” are highly overrated feats. I do not believe that it is either dulce or decorum to die at twenty-five for one’s country. My concern is also not with the economic effects of the long goodbye: the percent of Medicare dollars spent in the last six months of life, the prospect of every gainfully-employed worker supporting two retirees.

Rather, my disquiet is principally for lost human dignity. Canadian right-to-die activist Gloria Taylor, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, recently wrote: “I can accept death because I recognize it as a part of life. What I fear is a death that negates, as opposed to concludes, my life.” Sudden death is a conclusion. Too often, I fear, the long goodbye devolves into a negation.

In medical ethics—the field in which I do my academic research and writing—the way we now die has led to the birth of entirely novel schools of thought. When life was truly brutish and short, whether in Hobbes’s sixteenth century London or Great-Grandpa Simon’s mid-twentieth century New York, the idealistic notion that all life was sacred and must be preserved at any cost carried limited weight in medical and moral circles. Although we have come to think of the modern era, post-Karen Ann Quinlan and Terri Schiavo, as one in which we tolerate less excess medical care than in past generations, the reality is that physicians and patients were once much more accepting of death than they are now. They had to be. The so-called “culture of life,” so recently embraced by the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, generally advances the view that life in its essence, rather than its quality, is of paramount value. The impact of this viewpoint upon modern healthcare and medical discourse cannot be underestimated. Yet this dogma is far more a product of technology and material change than of theological evolution. In a world where people keeled over on street corners without advance notice, the notion of controlling (or even defeating) death made little sense.

The slow demise of sudden death has also reshaped vast aspects of our culture and our iconography with little notice and less comment. How does it alter our society to live in a world influenced by elder statement—and then to watch those elder statesmen dotter into decrepitude? Franklin Roosevelt will forever be a jaunty sixty-three, Adlai Stevenson a distinguished sixty-five, Estes Kefauver—for those who still remember him—a scrappy sixty. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, as his memory faded and his world grew smaller, lost much of his magic. Clark Gable didn’t lock in his permanent sex appeal as Rhett Butler or Fletcher Christian, but with a catastrophic thrombosis at fifty-nine. It’s not so clear that an extra two decades enhanced Marlon Brando’s legacy.

Whether these changes are beneficial or deleterious, they are likely irreversible—at least by rational planning. Needless to say, we can’t ethically go around inducing cardiac arrests in healthy sixty year olds. What we can do—and what we have not been doing—is paying closer attention to the complex ways in which how we die is transforming how we live.

I fear the most subtle, yet most pernicious, consequence of a world in which people do not die suddenly is a world in which people do not appreciate life. ..Today, a brush with death often drives us to reexamine our lives.. Half a century ago, men like my great-grandfather didn’t require such a brush with death: living past fifty was itself enough of a risk to generate reflection and gratitude.