Leah Villari Extra Credit

I decided to read Aimee Bender's Death Watch. This was about ten men who go to the doctor to find out that they do not have much longer to live. Five cry, three get very mad, one smiles and one is silent. They go around doing things they would not have done if they were not given their “death sentences”. One man goes to Greece to find a lover to be at his deathbed, two actually die and the others cry in the arms of their family members. They all "live like they were dying" until they find out that the doctors made a mistake- only two of the five men are dying. One of the men who gets a call moves his family to the country where they raise goats; the other two go back to their normal lives. The man who goes to Greece meets a lover and has a good time with her until they realize that he isn’t going to die any time soon.  Shortly after, he calls his doctor back and finds out that he’s not actually sick and that his doctor has died. He died in a skiing accident.

The first thing that I got from this is the fact that it takes most people to get a “death sentence” to realize what they want from life. The man who went to Greece to find a lover waited until this point to try and find love. I acquired the feeling that the Greek women and man were together solely because they had the knowledge that he wouldn’t be living to deal with the consequences of their actions.  I also thought that when the doctor told the men that they weren’t going to die, that this was very simply put and blown off by the doctors. “Oops” and “we made a goof” don’t sound very sincere and made me feel like they didn’t really care either way. The fact that the doctor died in a ski accident, is ironic because he carelessly told people who weren’t going to die that they would and then he himself died. Also a ski accident seems like a strange but ordinary way to die compared to for instance a life threatening disease (what the men probably had.) It almost seemed like karma to me. Because the doctor misdiagnosed and then went on to lightly advise them that they were not going to die, he then died. From the story as a whole, I recognized that everyone is going to die eventually, it doesn’t matter if you get diagnosed with something that will kill you, or you die of old age. Regardless of what kills you, it shouldn’t take a death sentence to get you to start living life.