In an instant, I didn’t know if I’d get to see my daughter turn 6.
The rows of headstones crashed into each other like waves cresting, covering nearly every inch of the cemetery green in Queens as we zoomed past it at 60 miles an hour.
I drove. My wife sat next to me. Our 5-year-old daughter was in the back seat, her face scrunched up against the window, watching the world go by.
“When I die, don’t bury me in a place like that,” I said to my wife.
She didn’t so much as lift an eyelash.
So I said it louder, and with more bass.
“Please, don’t,” she said, her voice quivering.
“I’m serious. Don’t bury me in a place like that,” I said. “Send me back home. Bury me in Jersey.”
My wife stared ahead.
“Did you hear me? You got to send me to Jersey. Don’t have me out there with all of them.”
As I fussed about where I wanted my not-yet-dead body buried, she put her face in her hands.
“Please,” she pleaded. “Just stop.”
But I couldn’t stop. For more than a month I’d been obsessing over when death would come for me. I thought about what might be etched in my gravestone: Husband. Father. Journalist. I tried to sleep, and all I could think about were the class trips and science experiments and birthday parties that I’d miss if I were gone.
On July 13,2017, at the age of 38, death came banging on my chest in the form of a major heart attack. Specifically, a type of heart blockage that kills its victims so often that it has its own nickname: widow-maker.
It shook me awake in the early hours and felt as if someone had jammed a beach ball into my chest, pumped it to the verge of exploding and then pumped it some more.
I was a mostly healthy former high school and college athlete. I don’t smoke or have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes or a family history of heart disease or early death. Yearly checkups with my doctor never included any mention of heart disease. So I never considered worrying.
Yet there I was, doubled over in bed, nauseated, dizzy and drenched in sweat. I can still see the panicked look on my wife’s face, her eyes wide and wet as she paced the hallway, the phone in her hand quaking.
“You hit the lottery,” one of the cardiologists who saved my life told me. The worst kind of lottery. Despite my relative good health, some plaque had broken off in my left anterior descending artery and a blood clot filled its space, leaving that major coronary artery nearly 100 percent blocked.
I hadn’t thought much about how the human heart worked before that. But now I could picture the long snaking line down the left side of the model heart I’d stared at in high school biology class — my problem artery — and could imagine it clogged.
I had been feeling chest pressure for a couple of days, and in those days the clot grew, and hour by hour that clogged artery began choking my heart of blood and oxygen until I had a heart attack. Just a day and a half earlier I had felt enough chest pressure and dizziness to visit a clinic.
The practitioner there did an electrocardiogram and said the left side of my heart was slightly enlarged, but my discomfort was probably just gas. Don’t worry, I was told: “Your heart’s not just going stop. You’re not going to drop dead tomorrow.” But that’s what almost happened.
About 36 hours later, Dr. George Fernaine, chief of cardiology at New York University’s Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, was threading a catheter through an artery in my wrist to my heart and inflating a tiny balloon at the end of it to secure two stents in my heart to clear the clot that nearly killed me.
Dr. Fernaine said that had I not made it to the hospital when I did, I probably wouldn’t have survived. In that moment, as I was strapped down in the cath lab, a wide smile spread across my face. I felt a kind of joy that I’d experienced only a few times before.
