Things Could Always Be Worse

April 8th, 2005 by Scott Kirwin

One thing you realize about worse case scenarios is that when they happen, there is always something worse.

When “Da” - my father-in-law - was laying on his death bed surrounded by his daughters, his wife cuddled next to him, his grandson filling in the doctor about what she had missed of Lost - which was playing on the TV and the poodle running around under his bed, we realized that we were in the worse case scenario we envisioned at the original diagnosis only 7 weeks earlier.

And you know what? We knew that things could be worse. One of the doctors had told the Wife that he could last in “this condition for days”, comatose and struggling to breath in pain.

So whenever you think of the worse case, don’t forget that there is always something worse.

For Da there wasn’t. At 7:17 AM the following morning he breathed his last and a life that had spanned the 20th Century into the 21st, a mind that had formulated numerous patents, was stilled. Silenced.

It was a good Death for a good man.

It also reminds me of the scene in Young Frankenstein when Frankestein and I-gor are digging up a grave and Frankenstein complains:

Igor (Marty Feldman): “It could be worse”
Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder): “How?”
Igor: “It could be raining.”

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