Now Departing From . . . ?

Walter Cronkite, along with Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus and his spouse Betsy

 

Betsy Maxwell Cronkite, wife of iconic American broadcaster Walter Cronkite, once said “Errol Flynn died on a 70-foot boat with a 17-year-old girl.  Walter has always wanted to go that way, but he’s going to have to settle for a 17-foot boat and a 70-year-old.”  Though Walter was kidding (probably), have you ever considered where you would like to be when you check out? 

Today I rode the Katy Trail.  It was very hot and humid, which I don’t mind.  But, if I should one day overestimate my tolerance for heat and cash in my chips in the middle of the Katy Trail between here and Hartsburg that would be fine with me.  I would only wish for two things:

1.      That no one felt the urge to pass new legislation to stop people from riding the Katy Trail when it’s hot.  ;  and

2.     That someone discovers the late me on or alongside the trail before the turtles do.

The last conscious breath my mom and both of my granddad’s took was safe in their own homes after a spending a great day with their family.  You can’t ask for better than that.  In fact, at age 85, one of my granddads had all his camping & fishing gear laid out in preparation for a 3-day float trip on Arkansas’s Buffalo National River.  Unfortunately, after he laid out his camping gear, he got laid out before he had a chance to use it.

A friend told me his dad died in his workshop, one of his favorite places.  Another died after putting his boat on the trailer after spending the day fishing - hard to beat that.  Especially if someone else had to clean the fish.

When we lived in Springfield, a woman came running into the Sears store at the Battlefield Mall where a friend of mine worked.  “Please help me!” she said to my friend.  “I think my brother is having a heart attack outside in my car!” 

He was.  Luckily, a nurse was one of the people that responded.  As the nurse was administering emergency treatment with no apparent response, the man’s sister said “I can’t believe it.  My brother has been all over the world and he is going to die in the parking lot at Sears!” 

And so he did, probably not his first choice.

Sam Levenson once recommended that if you should die in an elevator to remember to push the up button.  Jarod Kintz suspected that people who die in Detroit and go to hell probably think they are in heaven. 

And now, for the rest of the story on Walter Cronkite.  Oh, wait – that’s the tag line of another famous broadcaster.  Mr. Cronkite died on July 17, 2009 at age 92.  It was not on a boat.  According to his son, Chip, Mr. Cronkite succumbed to “complications of dementia”.  He once said that, after he retired, people would stop him and ask “Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?”    Cruel that dementia could turn a laugh line into reality.  But if the stoical Mr. Cronkite, a man who covered tragedies and triumphs, assassinations and moon landings, had to report on his own death, everyone who ever listened to him knows exactly how he would have summarized his own fate:

“And that’s the way it is . . .”

At least it wasn’t in the parking lot at Sears.