Or just call 911, right? Unless I’m missing something.
Her death is the unforeseen tragedy. If she was living alone, then 911 for a 65 yr old in good health is sufficient. And her incapacitation/death must have happened very quickly; before she realized she needed to call 911. Likely thinking she has a cold or something, and very shortly being in a position where she can’t even call 911. Or asking Gene to get her a phone and that just not registering with him. Ugh. This is the sequence that haunts me but hopefully it went quick.
For Hackman, not to be callous, but he’s dead now or within 1-2 years under any circumstance, with the best planning or none.
Late: To be clear, the medical alert would have made it even easier than using 911, but from her perspective, I wouldn’t think she’d need a medical alert.
I don’t want to get into a digression about any particular device that I was just using as an example, but it has two benefits over having to make a call to 911. One is that it’s supposed to always be with you. The other is automatic activation if it detects that the person has fallen. A slightly more expensive version does the same things but works everywhere over a cellular network, not just in the home, and sends your GPS coordinates along with the emergency call. They seem like useful gadgets for the vulnerable.
I’m in the @Broomstick camp on this one, but I’d also add that we don’t even know if they DID have some sort of system usually in place that was temporarily inactive.
Maybe they had a housekeeper who usually came 2-3x/week - but that helper just happened to be on vacation when tragedy struck. I suppose some people might think to ask a friend, “hey, our housekeeper is on vacation for the next two weeks, can you check on us if you don’t hear from me every couple of days?” But that would be pretty unusual.
Sigh! I guess that illustrates a point being made in this thread. It’s just simple denialism. It’s like “I know that the frail and elderly might need this sort of thing, but I don’t. Hell, I’m not even that old!”
I shouldn’t criticize. I’m probably the worst offender at (not) being organized and proactive.
Exactly. Yes, such a pendant could have potentially helped. Why would she have even considered getting one for herself? She was, as far as we know, a healthy, active person, and at age 65, older, but not “elderly.”
She was certainly not the target for Life Alert’s marketing efforts or product positioning: elderly women, who live alone, and are at significant risk of falling. Exceptionally few people in her situation would ever think about the remote (but, obviously, non-zero) chance of suddenly becoming so incapacitated that they couldn’t even call 911.
A vanishingly small number of people would, indeed, spend much time or mental bandwidth thinking/worrying about such low-probability events, much less actively making plans to deal with them.
It’s exactly the issue that my wife and I are currently dealing with, with her mother, and my parents.
Both of our mothers are 84. My MIL was in a car collision right before Thanksgiving, which was undoubtedly the result of her being inattentive behind the wheel. She was widowed about a month before that, and while she’s largely recovered from her injuries, she’s now living, by herself, in a townhouse that is (a) much too big for her needs now, and (b) has stairs everywhere. As her car was totaled (and her GP told her, after the crash, that she probably shouldn’t be driving anymore), she’s dependent on her daughters, both of whom live over a half-hour away, for getting her around to doctor’s appointments, etc. She really needs to move out of that house, but is in denial over it: “I’m going to get better, and it’ll be fine.” Suggestions that she consider an assisted-living facility (which, honestly, she needs) have been met with vehement disagreement: “NO! Those places are full of old people!”
Meanwhile, my mother has glaucoma, and her eyesight is getting progressively worse. Her eye doctors are suggesting things like magnifying glasses, large-print books, books on tape, etc., which she rejects out of hand: “NO! Those are for old people!” She wants to be able to do things the way she always used to, and is struggling to accept that she needs those sorts of accommodations.
That hoary old document Desiderata has the line “Surrender gracefully the things of youth.” Decent advice. And most of us 50-70yos have done a pretty good job of surrendering semi-gracefully most of the things of youth.
What that story really needs is a second chapter about “Surrender gracefully all the things of middle age on your way to helpless infirmity.” That one seems to be the harder lesson for people to absorb.
I’m probably worse. I know two things that are absolute truths: (1) everybody gets older; (2) everybody dies. It has happened to everyone that has ever lived.
And yet I don’t do nearly enough basic planning with that concrete knowledge. Why? Probably because I subconsciously believe an immortal half-hearted 3rd “truth”: not today.
Along with aging, this can be a hard thing to grasp. I’ve been a big fan of the great Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock since childhood, and I recall something he wrote in passing that was not so much funny as a kind of soulful insight when he said something about the inevitability of death, “except for me, since I don’t intend to die”. Which shines a little light on how we all feel to some extent.
Epilogue (and possible spoiler): Stephen Leacock, despite his best efforts, died on March 28, 1944.
Gene Hackman had a sad and unfortunate end. As have thousands of other people. He did not deserve it, nor did he deserve to be spared it. He was a person. Many of us have ugly, unpleasant endings, and we should not obsess over his on the basis that he was somehow “better” than everyone else. We get what we get, and whatever that is fate has decided we deserve that.
Kind of. Her death was a tragic accident; his was not far off regardless. I’m not sure that a better plan would have resulted in a dramatically different outcome from his perspective.
But this is mostly because we simply don’t know where he actually was.
