Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall

horrified when I told her that I had dropped a cigarette and couldn’t find it. She begged me—no, she commanded me—to telephone her if I couldn’t find a dropped cigarette. I didn’t want to wake her up in the night, but she would not let me go until I promised, so I promised.
    Often I go to bed at ten-thirty. I sleep for an hour or so, then wake feeling jumpy and sit up for a while, reading a magazine and smoking. Shortly after promising Kendel, I dropped a cigarette in my overstuffed chair. I could not find it! I felt horrible, because I had promised her and it was midnight. I pulled out the cushions of the chair. Nothing. Then I reached down below the cushion line and found it. I finished inhaling the ember and went back to bed. I slept soundly until about three A.M., when the blast of a siren awakened me. I looked at my alarm clock, groggy, as if it could make such a noise. I sat on the side of the bed, two-thirds asleep, aghast to listen to the blast—then woke enough to see smoke billowing through the bedroom door. The screech was the smoke alarm! I had the brains to push the button around my neck. The voice asked gently, “Are you all right?” “Smoke is filling my bedroom!” “Stay where you are!” In a short while, after alerting firemen and an ambulance, the voice came back, “Don’t move. Is your front door unlocked?”
    Firemen from Wilmot and nearby towns arrived with a twenty-four-hour ambulance from New London. Kendel joined us, alerted by the button people. The front door crashed open and the ambulance crew carried me outside on a stretcher through the smoke. I saw no flame—but my big blue chair was pouring out a thick column of smoke. Confused as I was, I had glimpsed the source of the conflagration. The cigarette I found in my chair at midnight, alight enough to smoke, had left behind in the chair’s bowels a burning hunk of tobacco. In the ambulance the crew confirmed that I was intact. They took my blood pressure over and over, lower every time. It was a warm November night, but it was November. Kendel took shelter in the ambulance. At her request, they took her blood pressure also.
    On my front lawn the blue chair stood soaked and looking lonely. In the house the firemen opened the windows and blew the smoke outdoors, downstairs and up. When the ambulance crew took me back inside I could not smell a whiff. I had been saved by the shriek of the alarm that my friend Carole Colburn had thought to install ten years ago. Two weeks ago Linda had checked it out when it made a noise like an insect. She replaced the dying battery. Women had saved me again. Cigarettes are not only a dishonor but lethal, and not only on account of lung cancer. Was my life in danger from smoke inhalation? I think so. In the morning the armchair on the lawn again billowed dense smoke. The firemen had put it out only temporarily, and it recovered its prodigious outpouring. Kendel arrived and dialed 911. “This is not an emergency.” Firemen returned with water and foam, but they needed to use axes to chop the blue armchair into smokeless shreds.

Death
    IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not
pass away
. Every day millions of people
pass away
—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t
die
. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy