It's Valentine's Day, so why not talk about safety coffins?

Well, it's Valentine's Day, when a young woman's fancy turns to love. And an old woman's fancy turns to....death?

I wasn't planning on writing about death on such a lovely day, but then I had to go and read about the 82-year-old New York woman who was pronounced dead in a nursing home. But who was still breathing three hours later. The funeral home ended up not being her final destination. She was transported to a local hospital, presumably in an ambulance and not a hearse.

As of this writing, it's not clear whether she is still among the living. 

I do hope she wasn't all that aware of her surroundings, and that she didn't wake up on a slab, staring down at her toe tag and watching the attendant hooking her up to the apparatus that would push the embalming fluid in and the blood out.  Hey, what's going on here? Wait a darn minute, why don't you... 

Last month, there was a similar incident in Iowa, where a woman receiving hospice care in an Alzheimer center was declared and zipped into a body bag. At the crematory, workers noticed that she was still breathing. They called 911. She was sent back to her hospice and died a few days later.

Sounds like this poor woman - likely out of it, and obviously at death's door - could have come to while enclosed in a body bad or, worse yet, been burned alive. Or at least quasi alive. 

I've seen a number of people shortly before they died, and a number after they've died (once the funeral parlor has done their thing). And I've been with two people - my husband and my mother - at the time of their death. 

In my mother's case, there was no question. She was wired up, and she flatlined. 

In Jim's case, he had been in hospice for all of 45 minute. I was sitting with him while the hospice folks figured out his meds. We were talking - a little. Jim had been actively dying all day. I'd heard the death rattle several times. He was drifting in and out. Mostly out. And then, while I sat there, holding his hand, he gasped and died. 

I waited a minute or so, then went to fetch the nurse, letting her know. "Are you sure?" she asked me. I remember telling her, "Yes. I'm sure. I'm Irish. I know what death looks like."

The nurse checked Jim out and agreed with me. 

I sat with the body, shortly joined by my sister Kath and her husband, until the fellows came from the funeral home. 

There was no more breathing. 

Dead, as they say, is dead.

But when death is near, breathing does become erratic, sporadic. Someone could call a death without waiting long enough to make sure that the last gasp was indeed the last gasp. 

These things, of course, occurred more often back in the good old days, when things medical were not as sophisticated as they are now. 

Worse, there were instances of people being buried alive, and stories - were any of them true? - about people trying to claw their way out of coffins and up through the six feet deep. (At least if you're embalmed, you can't get buried alive...)

The nuns would tell stories about exhuming the bodies of those who were being considered for sainthood. If scratch marks were found on the inner lid of the coffin, the decedent was no longer a candidate for canonization. If they had truly been a saint, they wouldn't have despaired and tried to escape. A real saint would have just stayed there in prayerful repose.

(Nothing cra about a Catholic school education.)

In the 19th century, perhaps thanks to the imagination of one Edgar Allen Poe, there was a flurry of inventions designed to take the worry out of being buried alive. One was a bell

apparatus that the not-quite-late person could ring to alert the cemetery watchman to come along with his shovel. The invention was improved on to make sure the bell wouldn't ring because there was a stiff breeze or because it was being pecked by a bird.

More complex inventions were in the works. (Here's a link to a fascinating article from the Smithsonian on safety coffins.)

And they're still coming up with ideas. In this century, patents have been applied for for coffins with AV equipment. One I saw (in the Smithsonian piece) was for something like posthumous Face Time, the other for eternally pumped in tunes. 

Well, it's Valentine's Day. So Happy Valentine's Day. And why not talk about safety coffins? Who wants a loved one - let alone their very own selves - to get buried alive? Not I.

And not that I'm looking forward to it, but let's hear it for cremation. As long as someone makes sure I've really stopped breathing.