Swimming with Sharks
And Not Dying of Covid
By Walter Nicklin
It happens so suddenly, and is over so quickly, that only afterwards do I feel fear. Switching from breaststroke to freestyle, I race to shore. There, shivering on the smooth stones of the Atlantic coast of the northeast United States, I relive what just happened:
Breathing out, face in the water, sweeping my arms, hands cupped, barely beneath the surface of the choppy swells, I’m about halfway through my daily summer swim in Johns Bay as it enters the Gulf of Maine, when my right hand bumps into something solid, not fluid. Before I can recoil, the habitual motion of my stroke continues along what seems like the flank of something… something with a rough surface, something with a body mass more firm and much larger than my own, something very much alive moving in the water right next to me.
A shark? Who knows? But I don’t tell my wife, I don’t tell anybody; I do not want to be admonished for going in the water. For almost 40 years, it’s been my summer ritual, and I won’t stop now. The water is always so chilly that other people often call me crazy. I reply that it’s my Fountain of Youth. So the next morning, I return to swimming in the sea.
Several summers later in the Year of Corona, news comes that a woman swimmer has been killed by a shark off Bailey’s Island, less than 20 miles away. It was for her, as for me, a daily swim; but different from me, she regularly wore a wetsuit. Maybe the shark mistook her for a seal? That’s the speculation in trying to explain Maine’s first ever fatal shark attack.
Since I insist on continuing my own daily swims, a jesting neighbor volunteers to keep watch for fins in the water. His cellphone is ready to record gory video should I get in trouble, so he’ll then become a social media sensation. To my wife, who doesn’t think any of this is funny, I point to the conventional wisdom in statistics that the odds of getting attacked by a shark are less than getting hit by lightning. But my most powerful debating point in this Time of Corona, is simply this:
I’d rather be eaten by a shark than die on a ventilator.
How do you want to die? Not that you want to die at all, of course; but given the unfortunate fact of mortality, do you have a preference for what your obituary will cite as “cause of death?” To die intubated on a ventilator, from what I understand, would be a preview of hell: the sedated passivity, the total loss of agency, the horrific hallucinations. Even if like Lazarus, you are subsequently resurrected — resuscitated, I mean — would the nightmares ever vanish?
There are other ways I do not want to die. They are easier to articulate than what I do want. Like the old Christian notion of “via negative” — you can’t ever know God, only what God is not.
But how I do or don’t want to die is not just about me, of course. My family is also a concerned party, especially my wife. She’s more than a decade younger than I, while my age puts me in the cohort of Donald Trump and Joe Biden — dangerously close to the average American’s life expectancy of 80.1.
Worried about the potential medical costs of my going too gently into that good night, she not long ago asked me to explore options for long-term care insurance. But at my advanced age the premiums are prohibitively expensive, according to my insurance agent and longtime friend. Better, he advised, “to take your chainsaw into the woods on a below-freezing day and bleed out.” His display of morbid humor offers a modern patina to ancient wisdom:
A most honorable and merciful death for Native American elders was said to be solitary exile in blizzard-blinding wilderness — and, there, not unlike today’s palliative use of morphine, to fall asleep and freeze to death. Instead of burdening your survivors with thankless caregiving, you leave them a story they can tell of a brave and noble ending for a life well lived. Hypothermia as a kind of euthanasia.
If your life is your story, how it ends offers a last chance for, if not redemption, some kind of meaningful coda. For Donald Trump, for example, to die of COVID-19 would strike many as the perfect morality tale. Given his rollbacks of environmental protections, however, to see him eaten by a shark might be the most cathartic as a symbolic act for ecological justice.
“I’m not a big fan of sharks,” Trump has mused aloud, apropos nothing, on numerous occasions. “I hope all the sharks die,” he reportedly told Stormy Daniels during their tryst watching the TV show “Shark Week.” And one of his tweets goes: “Sharks are last on my list — other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”
The unreasonable fear or dislike of sharks is called galeophobia (or selachophobia) and no doubt drives the popularity of “Shark Week.” The Discovery Channel’s annual summer spectacle premiered in 1988 and has become the longest running cable television event in history. The ocean’s apex predator fascinates its land-based counterpart.
Quite reasonable, however, is the fear that sharks should have for humans, who kill an estimated 100 million sharks each year. In contrast, deadly shark attacks around the world typically number in the single digits. There’s the qualitive difference, too, of intentionality, of murder versus manslaughter. Sharks do not hunt humans. Whenever humans are killed, it seems to be cases of mistaken identity. It’s perfectly understandable that the black-wetsuit-clad Maine swimmer could well have been a seal — favorite prey — from the shark’s angle of vision.
To try to take the shark’s point of view may be empathetic to the point of andromorphic absurdity, but isn’t it easier to identify with a Great White than with certain members of one’s own species? Consider the commercial fishing practice known as “finning” — cutting off the still-alive shark’s fins to be monetized into soup and medicinal remedies. The now fin-less shark, unable to swim, drops to the ocean floor. Without moving water through its gills, the shark eventually suffocates.
To be finned must be similar to being put on a ventilator, but without the benefit of sedated unconsciousness. Instead, it’s an underwater “locked-in syndrome” — a body totally immobilized yet acutely aware. I can’t imagine a worse way to die. Yes, I’d rather be eaten.
Taken by the sea.
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