Because I could not stop for Death ...

Many years ago I was fortunate enough to be part of a large chorus, The Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia under the direction of Sean Deibler. We sang a brilliant new work, Harmonium, by the contemporary composer, John Adams. The piece will not be performed frequently because of the size of the forces required and difficulty of some of the minimalist writing. Nonetheless it was a thrill to perform and my son Howard persuaded me to purchase a copy of the full score for him. There is no doubt that it had a significant effect on his composing career.

Last week I pulled out the CD of the original San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performance, especially for the middle section based upon a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Over the Labor Day weekend in 2001 I was out running along the trails in the Valley Forge National Park. I had planned a 20 mile run in preparation for the upcoming Philadelphia Marathon. The run started out well but at mile two I felt sting of a bee or wasp on my temple. I thought nothing of it having been stung many times before in my life. In fact I had been stung a few weeks before on a run with nothing more than a bit of irritation on my leg. A few minutes later I was feeling odd, commenting to myself that the run wasn't going so well. Shortly thereafter I collapsed on the ground unconscious. Fortunately, others on the trail saw me go down and were able to call for an ambulance. It took a while to get the ambulance to me, but I came to before they arrived. When they got to me my blood pressure was about 60 and I was in a bad way.

Once in the ambulance it was quickly determined that I had an anaphylactic reaction to the bee sting and we were off to Phoenixville Hospital. I had an overnight stay in the IC unit, but they got my blood pressure back to its rock steady 120/80 in a couple of hours. The next day I was out running again.

A few weeks later I met with my physician and we agreed that since I was outside so much running and cycling that it would be good for me to get desensitization shots. There was one problem though. When they sent my blood off to the lab they could find no evidence of any allergy to bee or wasp stings of any kind. I was supposed to carry my EpiPen just to be safe.

At the time of the run-in with the bee I was 54 years old, out doing everything possible to outlive my mother who died at exactly that age while being operated on for a heart attack. The irony was obvious.

A week later, September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my breakfast table, logged on to the Internet to read the NY Times on-line. The TV had CNN on in the background but before the coffee was finished I watched the second plane as it crashed into the World Trade Center. The first crash was not an accident.

How fleeting is life. How random are the events that give some the right to see the next day and others lose that right. How much richer were the colors that I saw behind the lens of my camera from that week on.

Over the last four years there have been many marathons, bike rides, triathlons, a couple of Ironman events and the birth of two more grandchildren. Over the last four years the world has fallen apart at the seams in no small measure because of a terribly inappropriate reaction to a tragedy caused by human fear and fallibility.

On Thursday, August 25, 2005 I was out doing something I avoided far too long: trim the shrubs. I'm a city boy and this gardening stuff doesn't compute. This is hard work even with the neighbor's borrowed electric trimmers. I was almost done and I feel a prick on my hand and don't think much of it all, trimming away at the hard to reach areas. A few minutes later I realized that I was feeling dizzy and was on my way in the house to get that EpiPen so efficiently stored in the kitchen drawer. As I stumbled to the front door I collapsed for the second time in my life. My neighbor, whose name is also Howard, saw me in trouble and got to me in time for me to mumble "bee sting" before I was out cold.

I do not know how long I was out. Howard said the ambulance got there in about five minutes. I came to with an oxygen mask on and people sticking things in both of my arms. I couldn't see anything but the first words I heard was the EMT ask me if I knew where I was. I said, "I'm in an ambulance on my way to Phoenixville Hospital." He said, "You'll be OK."

By the afternoon my blood pressure returned to normal and I insisted on going home and not staying the night. Reluctantly the doctor approved and my neighbor picked me up. I did have some lingering effects. Apparently, when I fell I bumped my head and had a mild concussion because for several days I couldn't move my head too quickly without the world spinning. They didn't pick that up but that's OK.

Last week I'm reading the Internet weather maps and checking with the National Hurricane Forecast center and the 3 day cone points directly to New Orleans. The storm is progressing from a Category 1 all the way up to a Category 5. It's jump across Florida did little to slow her down. The warm waters of the Gulf did their strengthening and disaster was inevitable to anyone who knew anything about the weather. Obviously, more than one person in the government knew less than I did. How many thousands of lives will have been lost because of flawed intelligence?

As the Weather Channel and CNN and the New York Times and the rest of sentient world pleaded for a rapid response, our regal government at all levels allowed the carriage to visit too many people unable to find their own carriages out of harm's way.

I put on Harmonium and relived many happy and sad moments of my life and how close I was on two occasions to have Death stop for me. The juxtaposition of the terrorist attack and my first bee sting and the natural and administrative tragedy of Katrina and my second bee sting could not go unmarked. Playing a significant piece of music is my religious approach to those moments. Twice a different kind of carriage, an ambulance, carried me away from eternity.

I am fortunate to have a wonderful career, a beautiful and growing family, good health, a modicum of talent and an awareness of the richness of color, in no small measure thanks to two pairs of personal and public events. I bike and run by schools where children play ... by fields of gazing grain ... I cannot stop for Death, but I know one day he will kindly stop for me.