Death and Doctors

     I read an essay,  "How Doctors Die,"  which according to the author is different from the rest of us.  Mostly anecdotal in nature, the essay points out that the great majority of doctors do not opt for extreme life-saving measures such as CPR when they are near death, and have Advance Directives which relay their end-of-life wishes.   The essay was and is the subject of much controversy, lacking actual statistics as it does.  As a means of clarification, Johns Hopkins conducted a survey of doctors and their final wishes, and found that 95% of doctors choose not to have CPR if they are in what is considered an  irreversible coma, while only about 20-25 % of non-doctors are making that choice.  Regular people get much of their medical information from television, where patients  frequently undergo lifesaving CPR and leave the hospital hale and hearty. Doctors are in a position to understand how extremely rare that scenario actually is, and so they choose to avoid what they know would only extend their final agony. 
    I have known  two people who related their tales of coming back from the dead.  One was a student from years ago; she told me as a young teen that she had memories of dying twice over a period of a few years.  She remembered falling aleep on her couch, and waking up to being told that she had died. She had some cognitive issues, but I think she is still alive after these many years,and I seem to recall she'd married and had children.  The other person brought back from the dead used to own a bar in the neighboring village. He'd had a heart attack, stopped breathing, was administered CPR and apparently recovered.  I knew who he was, had taught his children, but had never really spoken to him other than casually.  At the time, I used to take my mother and aunt to the laundromat which was near his home.  The man must have stopped working at his business by then, because he would be walking near the laundromat, or the grocery store just up the street.  He would approach us, and apparently haunted by his escape from death, go over the details, starting with,"You know, I died last summer" (or whatever time it was).  I'm thinking we were not the only ones he told his story to; it must have been an overwhelming compulsion for him to try to find his place back among the living.  I remember feeling sorry for him, as did my mother, and a little uneasy, but I was young then and didn't pay much heed to tales from the other side.  I can't say how long he lived after being revived:  I can only hope he found some measure of peace before he had to face death again.