Where there’s a will, there’s a … will?

I wonder.

Filed with the wills of my wife and myself are “advance directives.” They whether we want doctors and hospital staff to try to bring us back to life if we are clinically dead or nearly so.

They also specify the people we have named to act for us if we are unable to act for ourselves in matters medical and financial.

I prefer to not be resuscitated if I am in extremis. I have had a long and full life, and have no great fear of being dead. Actually, I “die” in one sense every night. Shakespeare called sleep our “little death,” with good reason. We conk out. Whether we wake up in bed, in Heaven, or not at all are up for grabs each and every night.

I do have misgivings about the “how” of dying. I dislike pain. I detest being feverish, incontinent, nauseous, drooling – all the unpleasant symptoms associated with getting ready to be dead.

Ideally, I want my life to be “Happy, healthy; happy, healthy; happy, healthy – Dead.” The phrasing comes from a delightful lecturer at last year’s Mother Earth News Fair held in nearby Seven Springs.

Don’t I want the chance to say goodbye to my children, grandchildren, extended family, in-laws, dogs, cats and chickens?

Well, no.

They know that I love them. They also know that I like most of them, most of the time.

It makes for good theater to picture the weeping family at the bedside of the fast-fading patriarch, as happened to, among others, George Washington.

I prefer another scene.

“Oh!” or, in the last words of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, “Wow! Oh, wow!” Then conk out, exit stage left, finis.

But we do not get what we prefer. We get what comes to pass.

So I wonder, and I worry, about wills.

I do not worry at all about what I will leave to whom. There isn’t much to leave. I have every intention of using up most of it before my demise. My wife and I have made arrangements that seem to us to be sensible if the other dies first. My children get some sentimental stuff, and that’s about it.

The worry, then, is not about the bequests so much as it is about those “advance directives.”

I read “horror stories” about such directives not being found at a time of crisis. Who has access to a safe deposit box within a bank at 3 a.m. on a Sunday?

Emergency room doctors and staff have a gut-level passion to fight to keep patients alive; that is why they go into trauma medicine in the first place. They also have a healthy dislike of being sued for not doing everything possible to keep patients alive. Such suits can damage their own chances of being “Happy, healthy.”

So I understand their probable reactions when, as I lie comatose on a gurney, someone says, “There is a do-not-resuscitate order somewhere.”

I would say, “Show me!”

Wouldn’t you?

So I took copies of our wills and advance directives along with us on last winter’s trip to Florida. Our lawyer, Sharon Smith, made the suggestion, even though she said that she is a phone call away and could provide copies by fax upon request. But what if she, too, is on vacation or otherwise unreachable?

I also brought those documents to the office of our family doctor, to be entered into that computer system.

But I was dismayed to receive one of those informative PDF “clinical visit summary” documents, not from the doctor but from the hospital, in this instance Penn Highlands DuBois.

I scrolled through it. Under “advance directives,” I found, “There may be information available, but it has not been provided by the sender.”

I sent an appropriate request via email. I trust that, by the time this sees print, that information will be available in my patient profile.

But just how far should we carry this “Be prepared!” stuff? I had thought that I reached its apex in my Eagle Scout days.

Should I keep copies in the homes of each of the children we sometimes visit? Should I keep advance directives in the glove compartments of our vehicles? Well, yes, in theory. But it would be my luck that my death-inducing injuries would come in a car crash that featured my still-breathing extraction from the vehicle, followed by the vehicle’s irruption into document-destroying flames. There is such a thing as carrying things too far.

Reasonable steps are in order, I suppose.

But I still walk around imploring higher beings to arrange my departure along the lines of “Happy, healthy; happy, healthy….”

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net