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Flirting with death

By Merrill Ogden - | Jan 15, 2025

People who know me, know that I think about death semi-occasionally. OK – occasionally. All right – quite often. I mean, it’s a natural thought when one reaches a certain age. And I’ve been at that age for many years.

I can’t tell you what that age is exactly. But it may have to do with the fact that it seems like many of my friends and classmates have been dying at quite a high rate since I graduated high school back in 1970.

I don’t remember the exact number. But, by the time we had our 10-year class reunion, we’d already lost nearly 10 of our 130+ classmates. Our most recent one died about a month ago.

I don’t mean to be morbid, but death is “part of life.” It just happens to be the end part of life as we know it here. And, the “here and now” is what we’re familiar with. The after-life life is mysterious and unfamiliar to most of us.

And there are some among us in Sanpete who aren’t so sure about the continuation of life. They are in the “when you’re dead, you’re dead” camp.

The recent event that has brought this topic up in my mind again was the life-flighting of my oldest brother to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. He lives out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Idaho. (Not that Idaho is “nowhere,” but the middle of it is, in that it’s far away from “civilization”)

Having suffered an apparent heart attack, a helicopter rushed him to Boise. There he was tested, scanned, tested, imaged and tested. The diagnosis: No heart attack – the symptoms were probably due to over-exertion from snow removal activity.

Of course, the poor guy has had multiple heart attacks and surgeries, and life flights over the years. It’s not like it was a frivolous false alarm.

My other living brother was also life flighted within the past year. When I get word of these events, it’s a natural response for me to “brace myself.”

I tell people that I belong to a very elite club. I’m the only one out of five brothers who isn’t either dead or had heart by-pass surgery. I’m keeping my fingers, toes and eyes crossed.

I do flirt with death a little though. As I’ve aged, I try not to flirt as much as I used to do. Here’s what I mean.

I very seldom cross the yellow line to pass cars when out on the highway (tractors don’t count). Any speeding I do when driving is most often inconsequential.

I avoid road rage. Even though, I was tempted recently to turn around and chase down a psychopath on the road. He (I assume this was a male) “brighted me, and left his truck’s headlights on in an extremely bright mode for the duration of our approach one to another.

This was after I mistakenly (stupid me) “brighted” him when I thought he was running high beams toward me, when in reality, it was his low beams which were abnormally bright. (did you follow all of that?)

Anyway, my better nature won out and I didn’t do any “run down.” I figured he was most likely better armed than me and it would be like taking a knife to a gunfight. And I didn’t even have a knife. (Just because I thought about it, doesn’t mean I’d ever really do it. Road rage seems to be killing more and more people lately, have you noticed?)

There are other ways that I live my life less dangerously these days. I now lay down if I look over the edge of a cliff when hiking in canyons. The Grand Canyon National Park people advise that visitors should stay at least 6 feet away from the edge of the canyon’s rim.

Food is a whole, big category of its own. Anymore, it’s not very often that I tempt fate by eating more than a pint of ice cream at a time.

I’ve held myself back from entering any life-threatening eating contests. Even though, I do love hotdogs. And, I do love pie.

However, speaking of food, I do take some chances. I continue to eat food which is past the expiration date and/or the “best by” date. Hey, I feel like yogurt, which I do like, was already “rotten” when they first packaged it. What difference is a day, or a week, or a month going to make?

I took a chance last Sunday with a food choice. My wife had made a super-duper Sunday dinner with roast beef, mashed potatoes, salad, and cocktail shrimp with a very horseradishy cocktail sauce. (I’m salivating again)

So, what did I choose as a drink to go along with this meal? It seemed like a good idea to come up out of the basement “fruit room” (storage room) with a quart of home canned apricot nectar – from 2013.

We have several bottles of that vintage still hiding away. The juice had a little darker color than when it first went into the bottle. But, when opened, it passed the smell test. My wife declined to join me in the drinking of it while muttering something about that botulism has no odor.

I mixed my second serving of it with soda pop and told Diane that the hospital wasn’t that far away. She sipped her apple beer and smiled. Or was that a grimace?

I guess I’m just going to keep living until I die. And like the sign on display in my office reads, “God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things…right now, I’m so far behind, I’ll never die.” — Merrill