death in 2B

This is a true story (well all my stories are true) and this one is morbid. In August, my husband and I flew from Munich to Boston. We go to our seats, 3A and 3B before anyone else boarded the plane as my husband is singularly obsessed with protecting his “property rights” in the overhead storage – even in those instances like this one where we’ve checked our bags and are in business class.  His airport phobias are a topic for another time. Once our territory had been appropriately marked, we settled in and observed the human suffering of other passengers boarding and maneuvering themselves and their luggage. 

An elderly couple approached 2A and 2B and I had a strange thought. “Should they be flying?” Where does that thought come from? What skills or minimum requirements are needed to fly? They got themselves to the plane so the rest should be easy. When they sat down in front of us, I had another odd thought. “Oh no.” No idea where that thought came from either or why I would care who is sitting in front of us.

The new inhabitants of 2A and 2B, our neighbors to the North, were an American married couple who I judged (and I was, given my initial thoughts, definitely judging) were approximately 75 years old. My parents are in the same age range but are very active and healthy so 2A and 2B might have been very unhealthy 70 year olds and just regular 80 year olds. The woman in 2A had a distinctly grandmother hairdo that was white, short and probably had required curlers or a perm. The man in 2B was very big around the middle and his posture was bent forward. If I had to guess, I would say that they had not exercised or experienced physical exertion beyond walking a flight of stairs in several years.

The flight was uneventful until about 6 hours into the 8 hour trip, when a flight attendant approached 2A and 2B with food and drinks. The wife was seated in 2A (in front of me) and decided that she would wake up her husband because he would want something to eat. I happened to stand to go to the bathroom right as she began to nudge his shoulder. As she tried to wake him, I watched his head loll back and forth across his chest and noticed that he was an odd shade of pale and yellow. I quickly moved towards the bathroom as the voice inside my head said, “He’s dead.”

I took my time in the bathroom washing my face and brushing my teeth, and maybe hiding a little. While I was in there, the flight attendants made a PA announcement, “We have a medical event on board the airplane. If you have any medical training, please identify yourself to the nearest flight attendant.” And then I knew for certain…2B was dead.

Three passengers identified themselves, and one of them was a German ER doctor. He approached the man in 2B, crouching on his knees in front of his seat and attempted to find a pulse. He looked at the man’s wife in 2A and essentially screamed out the question, “How long has he been lifeless?” Both my husband and I tensed in our seats as he continued to use the word “lifeless” in loud German-accented English over and over while trying to assess the situation. I will never forget the way he said that word.

What followed was approximately 45 minutes of medical attention by two doctors, one nurse and several flight attendants. They moved the man from his seat into the aisle so he could lie flat. They opened his shirt, started an I.V., continuously performed CPR, administered Adrenaline shots and used the defibrillator to attempt to shock his heart. Nothing worked. He lay “lifeless” in the aisle.

The nurse and flight attendants tried to console the wife and distract her while they had attempted to work on her husband. I could not see her face or hear her voice. She never stood up. My husband said that he could see her crying, heard her say that they were returning from a vacation and that a family member was picking them up at the airport in Boston.

After that 45 minute effort, the German ER doctor eventually stated the obvious, “it is hopeless.”  At that point the team largely dispersed, but the obvious question remained about what to do with 2B.   A group of people, including my husband, managed to lift the man from the floor and lay him back into his lay flat seat. My husband was tasked with covering him with a blanket. He didn’t know whether he was supposed to cover his face or not.  He kind of did it halfway, probably satisfying no one.

For the last 45 minutes of the flight, the cabin was quiet. We sat staring at the back of 2A and 2B and I wondered what to do with myself. I ended up watching “The Big Bang Theory” and eating a bag of almonds I had in my bag. My husband looked at me like these were the two most inappropriate things I could possibly do in this situation. Maybe he’s right (I probably didn’t need the almonds) but it’s all I could think of to distract myself from focusing on the dead body two feet away from me, what the wife would do when they landed and exactly when 2B might release bodily fluids (I’m told it is roughly 90 minutes.)

Our plane landed on schedule but another PA announcement alerted all passengers that, because of the medical event, police would be boarding our plane and we had to stay seated. Police, EMT’s and a Priest boarded our plane and the man was given his Last Rites. The EMT’s smartly decided to have the business class deplane to allow for more space and privacy in taking 2B off the plane. So, we got up, made eye contact with 2A, put a hand on her shoulder and told her that we were very sorry for her loss.

And, then we recounted the story to everyone we saw for two weeks – and people were fascinated. I looked around and found these statistics from a post on Quora: “260 people a year die on commercial flights globally. There are about 22 million flights a year globally. Thus, the rate of death on a given flight is 0.0012%, or one in 85,000 flights.” If we can rely on this post, it’s rare for someone to die on a commercial flight and that’s a relief because it was really emotional and stressful.  And there are not enough almonds in the world to get you through it.