OK, so yesterday (Sunday) I got up, had breakfast, and went out for a quick bike ride. This is pretty typical for me, getting active in the morning helps keep me from feeling lazy and sluggish all day long. So when I left my apartment, there was a woman lying on one of the deck chairs by the pool. I'd seen her before, I'm quite sure she lived in the apartment complex, but I didn't actually know her.
For whatever reason I didn't have a lot of energy yesterday, so my ride was a relatively short one and I was back about 40-45 minutes later. When I got back, she had moved from the deck chair to one of the more upright chairs and was kinda slouched over. I figured that she was taking a little nap. Well about an hour later I noticed she was still sitting there, and another woman walked over there and kinda nudged her. No response. She was dead. The paramedics came and spent a good while crowded around her, but clearly there wouldn't be any reviving her at that point.
The surreal part of it was that an hour later, there was no sign that anything had happened. There was a family enjoying a nice sunny afternoon at the pool, the mother keeping her watchful eye on the kids from the very same chair where the woman had died. Everything was the same, except that a life had flickered out.
This all got me to thinking, as death is wont to do. First of all, did I screw up big time? Had I realized when I got back that something was wrong and called 911 then, could that have saved her? Thinking about this some more, I realized that when I got back, the woman who later called 911 had also been out in the courtyard and apparently made the same judgment I had - that the woman was simply sleeping. So it wasn't an unreasonable conclusion. However, if I ever see someone sitting/lying in an at all suspicious position, I'm damn well going to make sure that person is alive.
Second, I was thinking how when she got up in the morning, she had no idea that it was going to be her last day on earth. I mean, if she did know, she wouldn't've been laying around over by the pool, right? Which got me to thinking, if you woke up knowing that by the end of the day you would be dead, what would you do? Assuming that all your stuff was in order and you had until the end of the day (unlike this woman, she didn't even have until lunch), and knowing that there wouldn't be long-term consequences for what you did since you'd be dead anyway, what would you most like to do?