2

Champagne-related deaths are more common than lightning-related deaths. I grew up with a knowledge of lightning safety disproportionate to my actual experience with lightning. I cannot think of a single lesson in champagne (or even sparkling cider) safety.

What disturbs me about the ratio between lightning and champagne deaths—when people are struck by lightning, it’s uncommon, and unfortunate, but it’s not without reason. They were out in a lightning storm, for whatever reason, after all. They lost some kind of confrontation with nature, just as people lose to bears, and avalanches, and cholera. Their actions and the consequences of those actions are commensurate.

The sickening irony of a champagne-related death is that, barring the occupational hazards of bartending a party on New Year’s Eve, and barring the Jazz Age extravagance that demands a steady supply of champagne cocktails, eliminating these outliers, it’s safe to assume that the death, or serious injury, the incident necessarily accompanies a “special occasion.” For every (or almost every) champagne-related death, there is some reason to celebrate, some felicitous event, some mitzvah ruined by a bizarre accident that no one could possibly have foreseen.

I can imagine the scene, the silence pierced only by cries, the shuffling of feet, stilted attempts to help as minds struggle to comprehend the previous few seconds—the cork flew, foam spewed from the plump glass bottle and the cheers were cut short, or turned to cries of alarm, as a window shatters, or a wall fixture falls, or a man, in what seemed like the very same instant. The lost time, cognitive delay, reminds one partygoer later of a time he walked into a screen door, another of when she was T-boned crossing an intersection. The mind continues an event, fills in the gap, as it has grown accustomed, without incident, for a split second before it can make sense of what’s just happened. He had felt himself clear the doorjamb before he found his face pressed against the screen door. She had turned onto that sidestreet fully before she heard the sound and felt the concussion. Now, in this kitchen, or living room, she struggles at first to order the events sequentially in her head, to determine a causal relationship between the things she’s sensed—the cork, the cheers, the crash, the cries. One man thinks it’s a joke, that the person on the ground is pretending, and he laughs out loud. Another woman, already on edge from the popping of the cork, which she didn’t expect, is utterly lost in the commotion. The wife of the struck man is on the ground next to him immediately, prying his hands away from his face and calling out for someone to find help.

The cause of death is left out of the obituary, not mentioned at the service. “He died the way he lived, with good friends.” The absurdity of his death might cause laughter among those far enough removed by tangent or generation, but for those who were close, it is simply baffling. There is no champagne-safety course that can replace his life. Had the bottle been opened differently, pointed in another direction or under a towel, this would never have happened. But it did happen. It will happen again. All the towels couldn’t keep it from happening again.

Champagne-related deaths are more common than lightning-related deaths. Cheers.