Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure

Michael Downing was three when his father died suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. The family diagnosis was God''s will.

As a boy in the Berkshires, Downing was rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, but he couldn''t exorcise his fondness for the wrong books and other boys. He aimed for Harvard and escaped his inherited sense of identity--until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. Again, no autopsy was performed.

Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis and discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and that the first symptom would likely be his sudden death.

Downing had a defibrillator hardwired to his heart. Within weeks, he needed emergency surgery to extract the device and the life-threatening infection he got with it. Three months later, he was reimplanted--only to read in his morning newspaper that the new electrical wires anchored to his heart were prone to failure.

Life with Sudden Death explores a simple question: Who can you trust with your life?

Michael Downing’s novels include the national bestseller Perfect Agreement, named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by Amazon and Newsday, and Breakfast with Scot, a comedy about two gay men who inadvertently become parents. An American Library Association honor book, Breakfast with Scot was adapted as a movie that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. His nonfiction includes Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a dramatic and insightful narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as a highly readable book. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals. Michael teaches creative writing at Tufts University. He and his partner have lived together in Cambridge for more than 25 years.