Personal Effects

Stumble,
fall,
slide down the snow slope

--The last poem of the Japanese Haiku poet Getsurei, 1919

On October 16 th of 2020 my heart suddenly stopped. It remained stopped for several minutes. I was lucky on two counts. The first was that a nurse happened to be standing 20 feet away from me and second that I was close to the Wyckoff, New Jersey police station. The nurse performed C.P.R. on me
and the police rushed to the scene and employed defibrillator paddles. These people saved my life. I woke up three days later in the Valley Hospital and was told that I had survived something called sudden cardiac death (S.C.D.). The cardiologists tell me that only one in ten people survive this.

It occurred to me after reflecting on this experience that the problem of death eats all other problems because there no longer remains a subject to experience anything after it occurs. The great difficulty in coming to terms with this for me (and probably for everyone else who thinks about it) is that its finality
seems to dissolve all goals and engagements. Death challenges who we think we are and how we tend to think about ourselves. After it was revealed to me that someone had recorded my collapse and the subsequent attempts to revive me on a cell phone and I was able to obtain that footage, I thought that
that I should make a film about this experience and its emotional and intellectual aftermath.