Do Not Resuscitate: Flash Fiction by Dr. Julia Keefer (2016)

I save lives. I certify people in CPR/AED, pounding plastic dummies with doll-like smiles. I have housemaid’s knees and carpal tunnel on my wrists for my efforts. But we didn’t want to resuscitate Dad. He had advanced Alzheimer’s. My sis the doc kept trying to take out his feeding tubes and pull him off oxygen but our stepmother said God would choose his time. (God and advanced life support kept him comatose for 10 years as she sucked our inheritance into her accounts.) He was finally allowed to die at 95 when her priest convinced her to let him go.

So I went to Paris to clear my head and stay in a little room I rented on Boulevard Voltaire when I was a student at the Sorbonne in the seventies. I ate at the local Comptoir on Friday the thirteenth when the bombs exploded. Agility training and playing dead saved me and when the noise stopped I tried to save lives. I ripped open the shirt of an unconscious victim only to unravel the red, black, orange, and white strings of his suicide vest. I screamed for back-up: Do not let his vest blow us up as he dies.

Back home our stepmother died before Xmas of a neurologic disease that kills the body but preserves the mind, the opposite of Alzheimer’s. She left a sign, Do Not Resuscitate, on Dad’s condo, which we now own, along with her astronomical bills. I sang Xmas carols in the French church. When my time comes, I want to be resurrected, not resuscitated. Her disabled son says they are in heaven sharing eternal strife. I thought our mother would be his eternal wife. At least terrorists don’t own eternal life. Is it too crowded for me? Do not resurrect or resuscitate may be my final plea.