Freedom, Choice, and the Death of Us
“they did not stop to think they died instead”“‘next to of course god america i,'” e.e. cummings
Over the course of a couple hours after my mother was discovered comatose, the ER doctor offered us a choice: airlift my mother to a larger hospital for surgery to remove the clot in her brain that caused her stroke or leave her comatose, each moment destroying more of her brain.
Just twelve days later, in front of my mother then in a rehabilitation facility after responding well to the high-risk surgery, my father became unresponsive; the EMS team summoned by a 911 call were frantically trying to resuscitate my father, kept alive by his pacemaker/defibrillator. Since my father had resisted switching off the defibrillator and choosing a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, the lead EMS responder asked me where I wanted him to be transported.
Because of the proceeding days when we all scrambled against my parents’ health insurance, my first thought was how was I to know where his insurance would cover this event (ultimately the last moments of his life).
While cycling on the local rail trail near my university and where my mother now remains in a single room—the building in which she witnessed my father’s death—a friend and I pedaled up to a road crossing where a father sat on his bicycle with a trailer attached for children to ride along.
This intersection has decorative circles of brickwork on each side of the road. As this man crossed, he steered poorly around the brickwork—the Freedom, Choice, and the Death of Us | radical eyes for equity: