What a Way to Go

Don't do this.

Just last night, waking up in the darkness and reaching out to my bedside table, I almost drank calamine lotion instead of water. Fortunately I noticed the shape of the bottle felt slightly different and I groped around for the water, finally finding it. I learned today I would not have died but merely would have been quite sick and unhappy for several hours.

That got me thinking of dumb ways people die. The news today reports a 59-year-old woman who fell 40 feet to her death from a zip line into a body of water. How embarrassing. When I go I hope to maintain at least a shred of dignity during my passage into the next life. After all, you don't want to be the butt of jokes from the get-go next time around.

Or this.

Some downright slapstick ways to go, besides falling from a zip line, include burning up in a hot air balloon entangled in electric wires, skiing into a tree, experiencing a medical error during cosmetic surgery, getting eaten by a shark, falling off a cliff while taking a selfie jumping in the air and contracting sepsis from a pedicure. I remember my shock in high school when a beautician friend of my older sister actually died just a few days after some hair dye got into her open hangnail.

Dancer Isadora Duncan famously died from a broken neck after the long scarf she was wearing got caught on the wheel of the car in which she was riding. Several other not-so-famous people have literally died laughing. One man died after the fish he caught flip-flopped itself into his mouth, squeezed down his throat and suffocated him. Many people around the world have been killed by falling coconuts hitting them on the head.

All I'm saying is be careful out there.