FLIRTING WITH DEATH – TWICE!

Part 1. Dumbassery

My body lay crumpled on the driveway. I couldn’t tell what I’d broke, but I knew this wasn’t good.

“Wayne, you really did it this time,” I said to myself, as if I were talking to someone else’s body.

I’d slipped and fallen backwards off the wall edging our driveway, while pitchforking yard waste into our trash trailer below. I bounced off some cement blocks that came along for the five-foot ride, the top of my head crashing onto the pebbled pavement. My bald head gushed blood. “Like a stuck pig,” I thought. A gash on the top of my nose also was flowing red. The inside of my ring finger was slashed open to the bone. Both big toes felt smashed. I’d barely missed hitting the tongue of the trailer. My biggest fear, though, was the pain in my upper back.

That’s a lie. My biggest fear was having my wife see me in this condition, covered in blood, sweat, and dirt. “It could give her a heart attack,” I reasoned, finally staggering to my feet.

I reached for my glasses. They lay atop a clod of dirt, completely safe, even though, as I’d later learn, a nosepad had dented my noggin. I retrieved one AirPod, still in an ear, and found the other, undamaged, on the ground.

Here’s the thing. If Eva would have happened to look out the window of her second-floor office, she could have watched my entire acrobatics. But, thankfully, she missed the show since she was teaching a class online.

I walked/shuffled as best I could into the house and up the stairs to the shower, trying to avoid leaving too obvious a blood trail. Like I was a wounded deer fearful of being tracked, or some damned thing.

The shower spray stung my wounds where I had expected, and revealed other abrasions. “Yep, you really did it this time,” I unnecessarily repeated to myself.

Now in bed, the pillow and sheets staining red, I texted Eva:

(Tue, May 27at 4:04PM) As soon as you can wrap up, I’m in need of some serious nursing.

A few minutes later, I realized my message likely underplayed my situation, so I sent a second:

In bedroom. Bad fall.

In moments, my rescue nurse appeared. “What did you…” she started, but I cut her off.

“There’s no way to sugar-coat this. It’s bad.” I could see the seriousness was hitting her. I said, “I need you to hold it together. We need to figure out what to do…” and told her of my accident.

“I’m trying really hard not to lose my shit,” she said.

“That wouldn’t be helpful.”

Perhaps the best way to understand Eva’s perspective on the moment is to share the text she sent our daughter a bit later:

Well… so taking dad to the ER. He just fell off the motherfucking wall and landed on his motherfucking head. He didn’t get knocked out, big cut on his head, hurt his back/neck, prob needs stitches in his finger and on his nose… bloody fucking mess! God damn it!

Indeed. For just five weeks earlier, out of the blue, I’d had seizure from a brain hematoma, and the number one rule that Eva had drummed into my head (so to speak) was to not hit my head on anything. I’ll get back to that first near-death experience later, but I suppose it’s understandable why her response was equally worried and pissed off at me.

We headed to the local ER, and I couldn’t really argue. I did share one thought, “If it wasn’t for this gash in my finger, I might have wanted to try to such ride this out and see what happens.” I think Eva actually laughed at that point.

(My hesitation about not treating the slice of my ring finger had some history. In a much earlier life, I’d sewed up a similar gash on my shin with fishing line and a needle. It didn’t end well, as I tell elsewhere in “God Sends Maggots,” in Schmidt’s Shorts: Stories to Make You Smile.)

We made it to the ER, where I grabbed the first wheelchair I saw. They gave me a just-in-case neck brace. Then all the usual hospital stuff – CT scans, poking and squeezing, stitching up my scalp and hand. After the needles in my head, though, I wouldn’t let the doc sew up my nose. I told him, “No, I want a scar on my nose. To remind me what a dumbass I was.”

Afterwards, as a reward for… something, Eva took me to Carl’s Jr. But the first thing I did when home and settled into my recliner was stick my numbed-up, stitched-up, wrapped finger into the ketchup. I cleaned out the gap at the end of my splint by poking a fry into its opening.

It was starting to hit me. I no longer can trust my body the way I used to.

Part 2. The seizure I can’t remember

My seizure had hit me the night before Easter five weeks earlier. The evening had been nothing unusual – dinner at home, binging on Netflix. The last thing I remember, in my early half-sleep, was being aware that I was nauseous and having a hard time separating my dreaming from reality. “How odd,” I had thought. And then – out.

As Eva related to me later, since I have zero memory of any of it, is that I got up after midnight to pee, then seemed to lose my way back in the darkness. When I let out a yell from the adjacent sitting room, Eva jumped up. I went rigid, collapsed to the floor, and had a grand mal seizure. “It seemed to go on forever,” she recounted, but figured it lasted 30-45 seconds.

After calling 911, she realized, “Shit, I’ve got to get some clothes on.” Somehow, she managed to do that for both of us, as well as drag my dead weight away from the door so the EMT guys could deal with me, hauling my sorry ass on a chair-gurney down our narrow stairs to the ambulance.

Apparently, I couldn’t stop asking, “What’s going on?” but wasn’t processing their answers. In the hospital, I kept proclaiming, “What the fuck? I am so-o sorry.”

And then, in the middle of all this, I got the hiccups that just wouldn’t quit, making it very difficult to get an MRI. But they managed, and released me the following day, hiccups and all.

A blinding headache the next day sent me to the local ER. A dose of fentanyl fixed my headache, and a spoonful of peanut butter killed my hiccups. My new CT, however, appeared “worrisome,” so that meant back to the ER in Eugene, where I got my fourth CT scan, which apparently resolved the experts' worries. We headed home in the dark on Tuesday. As for my own memories of those three-and-a-half days, it’s like they all got deleted permanently from my brain’s hard drive.

I was barred from driving (or solo bike riding) for three months, so I took to regular walks. I was on the mend. Getting back to normal. Yard work. Like loading the pile of yard debris into my trash trailer. Done it dozens of times.

Then, BAM! Life changed forever.

Part 3. What happened?

After my fall, that last CT of my head showed that the hematoma that caused my earlier seizure had disappeared. So I don’t think that caused my fall. It was just my dumbassery, not being as careful as my old age warranted.

But what caused my hematoma in the first place?

I do have a reputation for banging my head into things. You name it; I’ve whacked my head on it. Cabinets, tree limbs, tools. But it was Eva’s new Mercedes SUV that I blame. It is a beautiful work of German engineering. However, when a while back I inadvertently hit the tailgate button when bending down to unload groceries, it swung down and smacked the back of my head along the way, knocking me to the ground, and nearly knocking me out.

I’ve often found her car unnecessarily complicated. For example, we just discovered that if you manually turn off the headlights, the parking lights on (just) the left side stay on. Something about parking safety regulations in Germany. You can leave the highlight set to “auto” to disable that. They need an owners manual for American dummies version.

I suspect that those Mercedes engineers would find some way to blame me for getting smacked by their tailgate: dumnkopf Amerikaner! As I’ve often said about her car’s various idiosyncrasies: fucking Germans!

Part 4. My guardian angel – Jerome

Flirting with death twice in five weeks has focused my mind. I’m slowly recovering. I’m a lot more careful – about everything. Some pieces of me will never be the same. Yet, as I’ve realized, there are so many ways this could have been way worse.

After my second stint in the hospital, I shared my incident in an email with a few friends.

One replied:

Waaaayyyyynnnnne! You are ridiculous!  Glad you're okay.  And I can't believe an atheist ends up with such a busy Guardian Angel saving his sorry ASSS  over and over!🤣🤣

I wrote back:

His name is Jerome and I’m not happy with his work. I think he has ADD. Some angel. But I’ll be skipping the risky Grand Canyon hikes this year. Maybe that was his intention all along.

Before I sent it, I thought, “Jerome? Why Jerome? Where did that name come from?”

The only Jerome I’ve ever known was Jerome Ringo, a larger-than-life Black man from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who was Board Chair of the National Wildlife Federation back when I worked there. I hadn’t given him two thoughts since those years. But the name, Jerome, seemed as good as any for a Guardian Angel.

Then, just a few days after that private exchange, I got an email, out of the blue, from a former NWF colleague, with a link to The New York Times obituary for Jerome, who had died a month earlier. A devoutly religious man, he surely thought he was headed for Heaven.

If Jerome really is my Guardian Angel now, was he just distracted when I fell on my head? Or had he let me fall as a lesson to be more careful? I came up with a third possibility: revenge.

Twenty years ago, when he became NWF’s Board of Directors Chair, I was NWF’s Communications Vice President. That put me in charge of the group’s annual meetings, where hundreds of delegates gathered to debate and set conservation policies for the group. My job included writing Jerome’s speech for the event, which in 2005 was being held in Washington, DC, in a hotel near Dupont Circle. I had in my pocket the final version of his afternoon speech, the one where he introduces himself as the new Board Chair. Around noon, I realized I had a couple of hours when I could sneak away to visit the Phillips Collection art gallery, which to that point I’d never visited. I went back to my room, got really stoned, and walked over to the gallery.

Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” was as wonderful as I’d imagined. But, wouldn’t you know, time got away from me. I made it back to the annual meeting just as Jerome was being introduced to give his speech. He was trying to control his panic and was not happy with me. (He did fine on his speech.) So fast-forward to Heaven, was my fall Jerome’s payback? I’m just sayin’…

No, I believe none of that. But I also know that our Universe is a strange place. And having two brushes with death this spring has given me plenty to think about. I’ve updated my will. Added that I want my ashes dumped in the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

Speaking of which, I’ll be rafting through it, departing July 5, the day after my 79^th birthday. It will be my tenth time. Plus, we already have a charter reserved for 2026. For so long as I’m conscious, I’ll always have one last trip through the Grand Canyon awaiting.

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Wayne’s Blog

ACHIEVING A GOOD DEATH

It sounds like a morbid oxymoron – achieving a good death. Who wants to think about that – good or bad? But it’s a truism: none of us are getting out alive.

How do you want to die?

There’s a new book about how to do it right. It’s by my friend of nearly 30 years, Chris Palmer: “Achieving a Good Death: A Practical Guide to the End of Life.”

He’s a fine writer and it’s a fine book, with sage advice for all phases of the sometimes-awful process of getting old and dying. Practical stuff, like wills, decluttering, hospice, and end-of-life options.

But – no surprise – if not depressing, it’s at least sobering. That’s why I had a hard time getting through it.

Hmmm. Would I rather contemplate my future death, or go for a walk? Read about “death cleaning” or something fun? Or watch another Law & Order rerun? Play with the cat? Feed the chickens? Clean the garage? Or… just about anything else?

Getting Old

One thing I’ve discovered about getting old (I’m 78) is that it’s a whole lot easier now to be happy. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, since I’m financially secure, healthy, and my brain still works like it’s supposed to. And not unrelated to all that, I’m married to the woman I love. What else matters?

Yet the mystery of life and human consciousness only deepens as I get old. Why me? How is it that I’m here, alive and alert to the Universe around me, in this particular body, at this particular age, in this particular place? Of all the billions of humans alive at this moment, and the billions and billions more who have ever lived, how did I luck out?

Why am I not a Palestinian trying to stay alive on the streets of Gaza? Or that guy living in a broken-down van in the Walmart parking lot? If I’d been born into my Schmidt family, but a few generations earlier, I would have been trapped in a claustrophobic Mennonite culture, farming wheat on the frigid steppes of Eastern Europe.

And as if that’s not mystery enough, what about my place in the whole of the Universe? The one we know of has been around three times longer than Earth has existed. It’s size and complexity are beyond human comprehension. Who else is out there?

Consider, for example, how many grains of sand exist on all the beaches of all the lakes and rivers and oceans on Earth. In our Universe, there are more planets orbiting distant stars out there than that number. In all that infinitude, is it conceivable that we’re the only conscious creatures that exist? And then there’s the Multiverse…

Yet here I am, alive in this moment on Planet Earth, blessed with brilliance, cursed with ignorance.

In any event, I certainly wasn’t expecting how good this time of life would feel. I’ve been retired for nearly 20 years, and I thought getting old would be more of the same. Would I miss the daily challenges and rewards of work, or the friendships that came with it? Turns out, no and yes. I’ve discovered, nevertheless, that the closer I get to the end, the richer life has become.

I’ve purged my urge for something greater or different from life. I’m more content than ever. How can life get any better than this?, I constantly ask myself, yet every year I seem to be even happier.

Luck of the Draw

A lot was luck: being born white, male, American, smarter and healthier than average, and alive in this peculiar era in history that gave me the freedom to do lots of different stuff to make a living.

I don’t know what portion of our fate in life is predetermined by our inherited genes. A lot. For the geniuses and artistic prodigies among us, it might be about all that matters. That’s not me, but I did get decent genes. Not great, but decent. Luck of the draw.

Ephemera

I’m struck with the profligacy, the immensity of life and death. Every one of us, and every human ever to have lived on this planet, has a unique genetic picture and story. For those of us who survive to old age, those stories reflect a kaleidoscope of experiences and learning. Optimistically, wisdom.

We pass on our genes, and wisdom, or not. And yet, in every case, it all ends up no more than smoke in the wind, quickly gone and mostly forgotten. That’s life. So to speak. But what a waste! Among the rare geniuses among us – the Einsteins and the Jeffersons and the Vivaldis – they often bequeath us their visions. Humanity evolves. Art is created. Inventions happen. Yesterday, flush toilets, tomorrow, AI. The future leaves us behind.

Kicking the Bucket List

Doesn’t everyone have a bucket list, things they want to do, places to go or live, stuff to own? All my life I’ve had one. But now, for the first time ever, I have exhausted my bucket list. Everything I ever imagined doing, I’ve done. Every place I longed to visit, every national park I dreamed about, I’ve been there. Every experience I ever truly wanted, I’ve had.

Bicycle-delivery boy and hippie mailman in San Francisco. Great Lakes protector, lobbyist, and nemesis of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Non-profit organizer. Newspaper reporter. Desert land developer. Construction project manager. Environmental science expert, lobbyist, and gadfly. A V-P of the National Wildlife Federation. Husband, father, grandfather.

Along the way, I’ve hitchhiked thousands of miles across the U.S. and Canada, driven hundreds of thousands more. I’ve seen every state except Hawaii, and most Canadian provinces. I’ve fished and hiked all over the place, shot a trophy buck at age 17, and built a birding life list of 555 species. I’ve rafted through the Grand Canyon nine times (with two more trips ahead).

Having survived all these years of adventures and an unpredictable career, I know what makes me happy. I want for nothing. Of any place on Earth that I could live, I’d pick right where we are in western Oregon. Our home for 20 years is as close to perfect for us as I ever hoped for. We live in a beautiful garden, inside and out, all year long. Life’s essentials are just down the hill; if the big fir trees weren’t in the way, you could see from our house the Walmart, Safeway, Dutch Bros., vet, ATM, liquor store, dispensary, hospital, and a lovely walking trail along the river. The college town of Eugene, along the Willamette River, is but a 25-minute drive away.

My health issues are minor – a few pills for this and that; my hearing sucks; sometimes my back hurts; I forget things. But compared to what? It’s all relative.

As if all that good fortune wasn’t enough to ease my exit ahead, there’s this. I’m married to a brilliant nurse practitioner and professional coach (who’s given me a loving family). She knows me, sometimes better than I know myself, so I’ve no anxiety about dealing with end-of-life options. You do the best you can with what you got, and I’ve got a partner who knows well the final drill. (Plus, she’s an exceptional chef and an all-around bad-ass woman.)

I say all this, not to gloat, but simply to give context to my musings here. I know how good I’ve got it. 

Diehards

I had seen the elderly woman on prior walks, coming up the wooded trail, along with her husband. The gray day’s rain, in its early, drizzly stage, hadn’t kept us from walking this day.

“Diehards,” I smiled to her as we passed.

She paused, turned, and said something, but my earbuds’ music drowned it out. I smiled again, gave her a thumbs up, and kept moving.

A few steps later, her husband came around a bend. Regular oldsters, like me, trying to stay fit. As we passed, I said: “Gonna try to live forever.”

What do you say to that? Not a question, but an aspirational statement. He didn’t reply.

Genes aren’t everything. What you do, or don’t do, every day makes a difference. You walk in the rain.

I plan to die hard, living my best to the last possible moment. Don’t we all? In his book, Chris put it this way:

“Paradoxically, despite being what might be termed godlike, we die like any other animal, and the world goes on without us. No one knows the answer to this paradox. Still, we can confidently say that the best way to face death is to grab life by the lapels and engage in it – engaging in those very activities that make us so godlike and so unlike other animals.”

Afterlife

I want to at least acknowledge that my perspective on death and dying may not resonate with someone who believes in an afterlife. Having something to look forward to after you die – it seems to me that would pretty much define how you look at your own death.

I can see how that would be comforting. And I’m sure it’s possible to still savor life, here and now, even while expecting that the best is yet to come (i.e., heaven, your own planet, reincarnation, 72 virgins, whatever…).

I tried it. Doesn’t work for me. This is all there is, and that’s its own miracle.

Last Times

I suspect that everyone, from time to time, thinks: what if this was the last time I get the chance to… Fill in the blank. Ride a roller coaster. Visit Europe. Send your kid off to school. Drink good wine. Play with your favorite pet. Kiss your lover. Try a gummy. Watch a sunset.

As you get up in years, the odds dramatically improve that any day, any activity, may, indeed, be your last one. Along the way, lots of simple “last times” pass without notice. The last time you caught a fly ball. The last time you drove 100 mph on the freeway. Went six hours without peeing. Weighed less than ___  – fill in the blank.

I can’t remember the last time I waterskied, or ran a 10k, or toasted a marshmallow, but I’m positive they really were the “last times.” And that’s okay. “Been there, done that,” counts for a lot.

The reality of aging makes it easier to savor every moment, every experience, every human interaction. To appreciate the moment, even while relishing memories of a lifetime. It will all be over too soon. What if today really was the “last time”?

Achieving a Good Death

Slowly, life is closing down for me. That’s natural and I’m finding it’s not all bad. I’m happy with whatever comes next.

As for Chris' book, where I started this blog, the best thing I can say about it is that it forces you to think about what we'd rather ignore -- our own mortality. You can pick and choose the parts of the book that are relevant to you. Most importantly, aside from the practical information about the mechanics and options of our final years, he eloquently confirms the obvious:

“Our very transience – our realization of how little time we each have on Earth – can lead us to think about why we’re here and what we can do to make the most of our lives.”

Chris spent years pouring his heart and soul into this book, which is passionate, thorough, and well researched (as evidenced by 22 pages of nearly 400 endnotes). Is it too much? Perhaps. I don’t think, for example, that I’ll be following his example to write out detailed instructions for my memorial service program, along with readings and a music play list. At what point do such prescriptive details about your dying wishes become more burden than favor to your surviving loved ones?

But that’s just me. Perhaps as my time grows even shorter, I’ll reconsider. As Chris asked:

“At what point will I realize that it isn’t a future self that will die but my present self? When will I feel the full force of realizing I will soon cease to exist?”

I don’t feel I’m in the “soon” stage quite yet. I’ve done a bit of decluttering, but I’m not yet ready to let go of all my treasured rocks, books, and miscellaneous gee-gaws. In the meantime, I intend to putter with my clutter, surround myself with beauty, and keep enjoying this once-in-a-lifetime experience of being alive.

Have I learned the key to how to “die well,” in order to “achieve a good death”? Chris succinctly titled his second chapter: “Live Well to Die Well.” If that proves true, I figure I’m in good shape.

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“Achieving a Good Death: A Practical Guide to the End of Life”

Wayne’s Blog