After a dinner of cod, potatoes,
and the last of the summer tomatoes,
we play a game:
If we lived in the 19th century, 1850 say,
who would be dead?
I go first and argue
that I would certainly be dead,
there being no surgery then
to remove my cancer,
no radiation to finish the job.
My wife nods and says,
“I’d be dead, for sure.
Mine was aggressive
and fatal well into the 1990s.”
Then Mike pipes up, laughing,
and says, “Oh, I would be so dead,”
he of the pig valve and mechanical valve
from when the surgeon said
his heart was “spongy” from the bacteria.
We all crack up.
Mariana says, “I don’t know if I would.
I’ve never had any of those big things,”
so we try to help kill her.
“What about sepsis?”
I offer helpfully. “You gave birth
to a son, and doctors then
didn’t wash their hands
between autopsies and deliveries.”
She gives a slight shudder.
It dawns on us
this is pre-vaccines, pre-antibiotics.
Mike pulls out his phone
and soon rattles off “smallpox,
measles, diphtheria, malaria,
cholera, rabies, tetanus,
typhoid fever. Not to mention
influenza,” he says. “Ever had a bad flu?”
He looks up from his phone:
“Life expectancy in 1850: 39.4 years.
We are all 30 years past
our expiration dates.”
Out on the patio for dessert,
there’s a chill in the fall air,
the stacked wood for the winter
alongside us.
In the sunset spread before us,
this puny, half-baked century
even with its wars and covid
and billionaire thugs
is looking better by the minute.
We toast our dumb luck.