Pronouncing

Many years ago, when I was just starting out, I worked in a small New England town where local law stated that the newly deceased were not duly deceased until pronounced by a licensed physician. Legally, the undertaker couldn't take over—you weren't really dead—until a doctor said so.

At first, this sounded harmless enough, even quaintly appealing, a vestige of simpler times when doctors really were gatekeepers, ushering lifeless folks out of the world and delivering new ones into it. But that whimsy dissipated soon. My nights on call, preoccupied plenty with the living, brought frequent “requests” to pronounce the dead—now, tonight, it wasn't “decent” to wait until morning. Whether the call came from the local nursing home or from a distraught spouse suddenly alone deep in the New Hampshire woods, I was expected to drop whatever I was doing, travel to wherever the recently departed had recently departed, and pronounce the passing as officially passed. This seemed to me an inefficient use of my time. After one especially well-traveled night on call I expressed this opinion to the local undertaker, who seemed friendly enough (and remarkably well rested) but who said simply, “That's the way we've always done it in these parts, doc.”

In retrospect, this wasn't all bad. When the deceased person or family member was my own patient, it felt right for me to be there. But more often than not, the corpse was that of a total stranger who, like me, had been called unexpectedly to an unfamiliar place with an uncertain welcome. On those occasions, I felt like a cop or a mortician must feel, my words to the family hollow and perfunctory, my presence an invasion of their space and a waste of my time.

And so it happened, halfway through that first year …