Last Dance, Last Chance

him—that part of her who thought and felt and loved—it wasn’t fair to keep her alive.
    Dan talked to Sarah’s parents, because they had to be part of the decision, too. There could be no more agonizing decision for any of them.
    The press hovered, wanting to know how Sarah Smith was doing.
     
    Anthony Pignataro returned to work as usual. He had other surgeries scheduled, and he saw no reason not to carry on. When his staff asked him if he was doing all right, he shrugged off their concern.
    “That could happen to anyone,” he said. “We just have to go on.”
    In fact, he did a few more TUBA procedures for breast augmentation. He knew that the New York Department of Health’s Medical Board was watching him and that they might try to shut him down. He said as much. “They’re probably going to take my license,” he commented matter-of-factly. “I need to do as many operations as I can—get some money put away.”
    Debbie was heartsick. Anthony had left it up to her to tell Dan Smith that his wife had been rushed to the hospital. She had wondered how in the world she could tell him. She agonized over the impossible task Anthony had delegated to her. Once again, Debbie had been left to clean up after one of Anthony’s disasters. She had no idea what had gone wrong, and she had listened as her husband cried that he didn’t understand it either. Debbie hadn’t known what to think as she sat in the suddenly silent office with the surgical suite still in complete disarray. Anthony was a good doctor. She knew he was. He had to be after all those years of medical school, all those years of residency programs.
    Hadn’t she warned him in time that Sarah was in trouble? She wondered if the disaster might be her fault. No, she had watched the blood pressure monitor and the pulseox so carefully, and Anthony had been annoyed with her when she tried to tell him that something was wrong.
    She tried to tell herself that Anthony felt terrible about what had happened, just as she did. But she had come to know what was going on in Anthony’s mind, and she wasn’t sure. Maybe he just didn’t feel things the way other people did. He’d put up a kind of a steel wall around himself when his father died, and he kept moving forward, doing whatever he wanted to do.
    He spent more time doing body-building exercises at his sports club, and he drank a little more tequila in the evening, but he didn’t seem worried or remorseful.
    Debbie herself was so concerned about other people that she could not comprehend someone who didn’t care at all. She had been making excuses for Anthony for decades—not only to others but to herself. And he had been keeping secrets from her for just as long. There were so many things in his life and in his career as a doctor that she didn’t know.
     
    It was Labor Day, 1997, when Dan Smith made the most anguished decision any man has ever had to make. He told the doctors that he would sign the permission form to take his wife off the respirator. Sarah Smith legally died on September 1.
    For the first time, Dan went back to their little house in Depew to spend a few hours alone and try to get his head straightened out. He had to find a way to tell his children that their mother was gone forever.
    “But it was already on the news,” Sandy Smith recalled. “And we all knew Nathan and Amanda needed to hear it from Dan first, so he hurried to our house. Nathan was stoic. He didn’t cry—he just wanted to go upstairs and be alone with his cousins. Our oldest girl, Laura, has a son, Michael, who is a year older than Nathan, and those little boys kind of sat together quietly. Amanda cried.
    “I heard her tell one of her little playmates that moms die when they get to be 26—that her mother was probably going to die, too, when she got that old.”
     
    They had a wake for Sarah, and crowds of mourners attended her funeral in the Hoy Funeral Home in West Seneca. It was forty miles from the site of her funeral to the cemetery where she was to be buried next to her brother. The church where she and Dan were married was just across the street. The procession of mourners’ cars stretched out for more than a mile.
    The television cameras followed them.
    *  *  *
    Sandy Smith became a substitute mother for two little children, decades after she’d raised her own.
    “And all those flowers that Sarah planted,” she said, “kept coming up long after she was gone. She worked so hard on her