Dead Men Throw No Switches

So I started doing the nutritional program in earnest, along with The Boy, and got a bit of a scare. It's probably nothing, and may be related to the antibiotics I'm taking (for the ear infection from hell), but I'll be having a thorough medical examination as a result. 

It's not really something I look forward to. 

But it got me thinking about my mortality and taking care of business. Death isn't something I fear, generally. When younger, I had some brushes with mortality to which my reaction was "Well, I guess if it's my time..." 

I know that we get a sense of invulnerability, immortality, that nothing bad can happen to us, but there's also the "who cares?" aspect of it. When you're young you consider yourself sovereign over your life, and if you're going to do something reckless well, what's that to anyone else? You can see young death glamorized in a way that mortality otherwise is not.

And then you have kids. 

Well, crap. Now it matters if you live or die. (And if you're thinking, you realize it mattered before--back when you were SuperTeen--to your own parents. A feeling of embarrasment is normal at this point.) I mean, the finances are easy enough to handle. In fact, the traditional male role is easy to fill: I think a widow with children can probably much more easily plug in a new male into her life than a widower is likely to find a woman willing to take care of another woman's home and children. And how much more traumatic is that, that the primary caretaker be replaced by a relative stranger?

Of course, it happened a lot in the Old West (for example), with mortality in child birth being so common. And certainly it's happened that a step-father has a callous and indifferent (or worse) attitude toward another man's children.

Anyway, having a kid changes the game, if you were indifferent to your survival before. If you're cancerous and would rather just let it take you than endure the medieval treatments we have for handling it, you really don't have much of a choice. You have to fight. Congratulations: You've become more important than yourself.

It should also mean that you're not exposing yourself to a lot of unnecessary risk, like extreme sports, daredevil ballon rides, base jumping, etc. But that doesn't always happen.

Given the rather severe separation of my online life versus my real one, I've often thought about setting up a "dead man's switch" that would notify people should I not throw it. I figured the most likely result of that, though, would be a false "Blake's dead!" message. Heh. That might be funny once or twice, but sort of defeats the purpose should it happen a lot.

There's now at least one service that will do this for you, I think. It's been in the news a lot lately. But I suspect a lot of us don't give enough thought on how online folks would be affected by our sudden disappearance. (I've had it happen numerous times, and I don't know to this day whether the person just dropped out or something had happened to them.)

So, it's something worth thinking about.