Dying? Get In Line

I awoke this morning to a barrage of particularly cheery, not-so-newsy newspaper headlines:

"Pope receives last rites"
"Schiavo dies after wrenching battle"
"Prince Rainier’s condition worsens"

The death stuff used to be relegated to the obituaries. Now it’s a sport with box scores. Being a gravedigger, my own death will be just another day at the office, except my back won’t hurt and I’ll be better dressed. Given the preoccupation with death in the media, maybe gravedigging will become the new glamour profession. Remind me to get some new headshots for the portfolio, just in case.

Reeling from the stench of death in the air, I stepped outside to cling to my own life for a while, and a neighbor from a couple blocks down comes roaring up my driveway. He had a story that didn’t make the morning edition:

"What’re ya doin’?" I asked.

"Dying"

"Yeah, everybody is. You seen the paper?"

"No, really, I have cancer. That’s why I’ve left you all of those phone messages you don’t bother returning."

"I figured you were just calling to borrow my truck again and drive it everywhere but a gas station. So you were calling me because you have cancer?"

"Yeah."

"Need the truck?"

"No."

"Wanna make a deposit on an excavation, or will you be borrowing that too? Look, you’ll need a novel twist if you want to qualify for the Morbidity Games. Why don’t you sign up for a gift registry and send out cancer announcements? Have you alerted Congress? Has your wife named a successor? When's the estate sale? My snowblower's been actin' up. How long you got?"

"Fifteen to twenty years."

"Huh? That’s not dying; that’s lingering. Your docs didn’t diagnose cancer. They predicted old age. I could put on a white coat, hang a stethoscope around my neck and consult the life expectancy tables for your profile, a fifty-year-old fat guy with diabetes, and give you fifteen to twenty. And that’s assuming you don’t choke on a Little Debbie Snack Cake first. Get outta my driveway."

My neighbor has to find a less hotly-contested sport if he expects to bust out of the minors these days. The Schiavo-Pope-Rainier miniseries may rival a Stanley Cup Playoff for taxing the attention span of an audience, but fifteen to twenty years is merely pre-season stuff. I suspect I’ll lose several tanks of gas before he succumbs.