Death on Friday (Dying For Summer Book 4)

The manager of the historic Somerville Theatre gave me the entire main auditorium, with its Art Deco murals and wooden stage, in which to hold a memorial service.

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For a few fleeting moments she was literally larger than life, and I sat spellbound, wishing somehow it would never end. On what would have been our third wedding anniversary, I invited more than a dozen friends to watch our wedding video, which Laura and I had yet to see. It was a difficult request, but they came. I knew I would cry at the first glimpse of my wife in her backless wedding dress, descending a spiral stone staircase to our spot along the Atlantic Ocean. But I also felt joy, because we were both just so happy.

When the video was over, a friend turned to me. All the while, as I mourned and remembered her, the case against Somerville Hospital began to mount. Through numerous letters and phone calls, I obtained the grainy, horrible surveillance video showing Laura outside the hospital. All of which I passed to my lawyers. There was no reason given, though Nurse X was later briefed on it. Incredibly, though, even those extraordinary events would prove almost insignificant. Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter , Section 2 , was virtually unassailable.

It protected Nurse X. It protected the security guard who could have asked Nurse X whom she was looking for. It protected the hospital administrators who allowed safety deficiencies to exist.

Death on Friday (Dying For Summer, #4) by Jake White

Other families harmed by the system have previously tried overturning the state cap — many with even stronger cases than ours — only to fail. In some cases, after wasting a decade of their lives fighting in court. Why malpractice suits in Mass. My lawyers had mentioned the existence of the cap, albeit briefly, going back to our very first meeting, when I had no clue about what a malpractice case entailed or that malpractice caps even existed in Massachusetts.

Malpractice firms typically operate on contingency fees, collecting money from a client only when they prevail. If it went that far, my lawyers said, I would have to pay the firm — in advance — the costs of taking the case to trial. Those costs could, quite possibly, exceed any amount I could hope to receive in a capped verdict: That somewhere, someone else would die outside a locked hospital door, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Awakening in the middle of the night, I would imagine how frightened Laura was, how alone she must have felt those last minutes of her young life. My lawyers provided me with a written transcript; my two therapists sat alongside me for emotional support. I was despondent, and went walking aimlessly for hours. Stumbling upon a street named Acadia Park, I began crying uncontrollably.

Reading her words made me realize, for the first time, how mistakes were made from the moment she dialed on her iPhone. How seemingly our entire emergency-response system, and our emergency health care system, had let her down. How they could fail anyone seeking lifesaving care.

What could be done to save those lives, to make sure that no one else dies the way Laura did? I hope that regional call centers, cost-saving economies of scale aside, become a thing of the past. A local dispatcher, familiar with the hospital, would have asked Laura whether she was at the top or bottom of that hill. Somerville, in October, joined that list. Locations are so often wrong that, according to one survey, 82 percent of operators doubt the location information they receive.

But without federal leadership or funding, most states are still years away from implementing such important advances. That has to happen, without any glitches or delays, for all our sakes. I am not going to sue the Somerville police or fire departments, or the State Department — nor can I, as state laws grant them powerful immunity regarding response errors. Mistakes happen, in every walk of life. I hope that hospital administrators who learn of Laura are reminded of how important redundancies can be regarding patient care. In her case, something as simple as requiring two people to conduct a search — a second set of eyes — could have made the difference.

Such as walking feet, between two sets of doors.

Another study estimates the number could be as high as , Patient safety needs to be improved everywhere, not just at Somerville Hospital. As a nation, we have far to go to provide proper and equal care to all, no matter what hospital one chooses.

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That both Somerville and Cambridge hospitals are managed by the same health care organization shows how splintered our health care system is. Our experience at Cambridge Hospital, whose ICU staff could not have been more compassionate, is what health care needs to strive for; the lack of care exhibited at Somerville Hospital is what it needs to avoid. Public caps exist in some 40 states, according to the American Association for Justice, a trade-group organization for trial lawyers based in Washington, D.

Some states have compensation pools to pay victims in excess of the amount individual hospitals are capped at paying. Some states waive caps in the most egregious instances, when negligence leads to catastrophic outcomes; others have review boards that allow only the strongest of cases to go forward. Changes can be made without disrupting the entire system. She reenacts the entire episode as I film her, running, for effect, in her flip-flops to the spot where she tackled the last kid, who dropped her cash and fled.

I think about that adventure in Spain when I picture Laura that September morning two years ago, leaving for Somerville Hospital with her gym clothes in her backpack. She was confident, indestructible, and maybe. Laura did not miscalculate that morning, but she should have been far more careful. She should have told someone immediately that she was having an attack, regardless of what time in the morning it was, and should never have walked alone to the hospital. It is a message that I pray everyone who reads this passes along to the people in their lives who have asthma.

A message that Dr. Sumita Khatri, a national asthma expert and co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Asthma Center, stressed to me when explaining just how quickly asthma can turn fatal. The renovations began late last summer, with the finishing touches completed around this time last fall. Today, when you approach the front of Somerville Hospital, the entrance on the right that Laura found locked is now the main public doorway to the emergency room, just as it always should have been.

The bench where Laura sat is now, at night, bathed in bright light. I told the hospital that while I did retain an attorney, I now have no intention of ever filing a lawsuit against them. They still declined to comment.

Death on Friday (Dying For Summer, #4)

For the longest time, her name was redacted in every document, and my requests to release her name were denied. For me to face this person will take time. Nurse X knows Laura died; she knows she left her out there; I believe she even cared for Laura once she was brought into the ER. She lives with those thoughts, just as I do. To pay the bills, I work alongside my father in our family business, snow plowing.

Last winter, I drove a pickup truck, plowing Malden parking lots, usually in the middle of the night. A billboard overlooked one of the lots, adorned with, of all things, an advertisement for Cambridge Health Alliance, touting its stellar emergency room care. Sometimes I find myself counting off 10 minutes on a clock, imagining her lying there, waiting to be found.

As I play baseball, I think of those 29 feet. Maybe the publication of this story will give me the strength I need to cross even that chasm. Lying on my back, I stared into a canopy of beautiful, swaying trees. I like to think that Laura had once stared up at those same trees and that she thought of them, of their peacefulness, when she closed her eyes for eternity on that other bench. For a full year, I avoided even driving past Somerville Hospital. But on the morning of September 16, , I went there. I told her how much we all missed her and still loved her.

I glowered at the now-unlocked and well-marked emergency room door, so impossibly close. I was there only a few minutes when a security guard came out of the hospital and approached me.

A Summer to Die

Not knowing what else to do, I turned to the empty space next to me on the bench, and started talking to my wife. For the first time in an entire year, we had a real conversation. Laura was with me, listening, commenting, laughing along. I felt her spirit beside me, inside me, more so than I had since the moment I let her go. On the stone bench, I left a bouquet of purple flowers, a paper lantern from the night I proposed, and a Mason jar, just like the ones we had at our wedding reception.

I kneeled down to say my goodbye, kissing the slab of stone, as if meeting her lips. And the candle in the jar, to my surprise, suddenly flickered once more. Peter DeMarco lives alone in Somerville. Send comments to magazine globe. By Peter DeMarco November 03, The emergency entrance at Somerville Hospital before new signs were added.

She hesitates before choosing an entrance, then walks to Entrance A and tries the door 2. A series of images from surveillance video shows Laura Levis as she approaches a door at Somerville Hospital and finds it locked. Her asthma attack intensifies; she stops at a bench 3 and calls at 4: Police dispatch Cataldo Ambulance and firefighters from a nearby station, but they head to the wrong hospital door 2.

Laura, who grew up on Staten Island in New York City, loved working out, doing everything from hard-core spin classes to hot yoga. She goes back inside the hospital after 12 seconds. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was first launched in the United States in September , where it received high acclaim and spent several weeks at the top of the bestseller lists.

To date, more than two million copies have been printed in 30 languages and 56 countries. It also prompted Rigpa to introduce a Spiritual Care Education and Training programme, providing for the needs of caregivers. A revised edition was released in to celebrate the book's 10th anniversary. In , a new and further revised edition was again, published. The perspective is forthrightly and profoundly Tibetan, but it is expounded so clearly that the reader has no trouble discerning on every page its universal import.

The book has also received praise from a number of celebrities and public figures, who have cited it as influential in their lives. Comedian John Cleese said the book was one of the most helpful he had ever read. I guess that's what wisdom is, really. Since The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was published, it has been adopted by institutions, centres and groups of various kinds, educational, medical and spiritual. Something I find especially moving is that this book has been read by people with different spiritual beliefs, and they have said that it has strengthened and deepened their faith in their own tradition.

They seem to recognize the universality of its message, and understand that it aims not to persuade or convert, but simply to offer the wisdom of the ancient Buddhist teachings in order to bring the maximum possible benefit. In , an international programme of education and training called, Spiritual Care, was established by Christine Longaker and others in response to requests from healthcare professionals for practical ways to bring the compassion and wisdom of teachings in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying into their work and lives.

Over the past 17 years, they have worked with hospitals, hospices and universities, and trained more than 30, healthcare professionals and volunteers worldwide in all areas of healthcare and social services, and supported many people facing serious illness, death, or bereavement, and their families.

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