Time of Death

You are pronounced dead, which for some reason I always see as “So and thus was pronounced at 13:48, De.Ed. Dead d-e-a-d.” . Military time is used, if you die at 12:23am it would be posted as 00:23. Actually, you don’t “die” you expire and then it’s not as though they were always with you when you died. ToD is a rough estimate and sometimes you are declared whenever the Doc or Nurse gets to you to pronounce you dead – so if you really died at 5:36, it doesn’t matter because no one knew you were dead until 7:12, at which time they screamed for a nurse and she came to the room and said “Oh, Time of Death, lets see, Um. 7:16am”.

Back when I had to call nurses stations to ask questions or get the time of death or which funeral home at come for the body, I would ask “When did Mrs. So and So pass?” because the nurses were close to the residents and if it just happened I wouldn’t call up there and say “Hey, hire yew, what was Mrs. So and So time of death?”, that wouldn’t be very sensitive of me. I would make those calls if I had saw a gurney and a cheap black suit pass by my office – I often had to escort said cheap suit and gurney to go pick up the resident. In years past at that nursing home if a resident died the practice was to move the other residents up and out and put them in their rooms and close their doors so they wouldn’t have to see the gurney and the cheap black suit.

That works to a point. I mean if the resident died 11-7 chances are they wouldn’t show up until 7-3 with the gurney and the cheap black suit and that gurney and cheap black suit was going to be in the hall way while everyone was awake and moving around and they are going to want to go for breakfast not get locked up in their rooms until the coast was clear. Those cheap black suits glow in the dark and their gurneys make noise and it just wasn’t worth the trouble after a while… we stopped it. The facility didn’t use gurneys ourselves, and if you saw or heard a gurney it meant that someone was coming back from the hospital after going out 911 or were being admitted from the hospital or they were going out 911 to the hospital or they were dead - and any or all of these broke up the tedium and gave everyone something to talk about. To be honest, when Mrs. So and So died, chances are she had been dieing for a while and the fact that she had died would not come as a huge surprise to any of her neighbors, unless she just up and died out of nowhere - usually of a “massive” stroke or “massive” heart attack. It’s called a “massive” if it kills you. Those come as a surprise and everyone would say “Well, she seemed okay…”

I did hate those guys in the cheap suits though. Cheap, shiny polyester suits. The guys seemed kind of cheap and shiny too, walking petrochemical spills in bad shoes. One of them talked to me one day. I got roped into taking him upstairs and he broke all kinds of laws of convention by speaking to me in the elevator. I had taken a lot of these guys on their way and not one of them had spoken to me. I took them where they were going and then took off to make sure my office door was closed for his trip back. I did not want to see him again. This one time though, I don’t know if it took him longer or I was too fast to run an errand out in the building but I ran into him with his full gurney. He talked to me again. I nodded and tried to get away and he started singing “On The Road Again, I can’t wait to get on the road again!”. Ew. So freaking traumatic I remember it to this day.