The Man Who Owned the Hospitals

A fall can still happen in the minute everyone looks away.

By Neil Solomon · 2 min read

There is a story told here in Mexico about a man who owned a large number of hospitals. In the telling, he is one of the richest men in the country. I have heard it from people who live here, and I am telling it the way I heard it.

He was an older man, and he had care around the clock. Of everyone in the country, he was perhaps the person least likely to be left alone at the wrong moment. He had money, and he had hospitals. He had a woman whose whole job was to be with him.

One day, the woman who looked after him stepped into the bathroom. When she came back, he had fallen. He died.

I think about this story often, and I want to say plainly that nobody in this story was careless. A caregiver has to use the bathroom. Nobody can watch another person every second of every hour, not even with the finest care a fortune can buy.

What I take from it is that readiness has limits. We can hire the help. We can pick the finest building. We can put grab bars in the shower. A fall can still happen in the minute everyone looks away.

If that is true for a man who owned hospitals, it is true for the rest of us. We cannot prepare so well that nothing will happen.

What we can do is prepare the part that comes after. Who is called first? Who decides what happens next? Who knows where the papers are? Which of these things were written down before that minute, and which will be worked out in a hurry by people who are grieving?

My father had round-the-clock care at our house for his last years, and he passed in his sleep. I am grateful for that. I also know it could have gone another way.

So the point of the shower test is not to prevent every fall. It is to leave the people you care about a clear page.