Shooting a train death with smartphones

The people on the train shot him - after he started dying.

They didn't use guns. They used phones.

The man first collapsed and then convulsed in the aisle.

People quickly whipped out their phones and shot photos and film of him leaving this world.

Some snapped selfies.

I saw a few rows before me a man I knew nothing about aside from what he looked like and that he was having a medical emergency he almost certainly wouldn't survive, as became clearer over time.

And I saw a reflection of my father, who was actually seated across from me on the train, splayed out on the road in Jiangsu province's Wuxi about two weeks before. Blood oozed through his staples and bandages when I looked at my amazingly still living dad next tome.

That accident is why we were on the train.

I was watching an alternate version of Dad's situation play out on the train. Sometimes, the smartphones provided a clearer view - in every sense - of what was actually happening.

Feet obscured the head on the ground.

You could see the man dying better in the screens than in real life a few actual rows ahead.

The reason I was on the train with my father was to help him carry his belongings to leave China after surviving a traffic accident that would have killed him if he hadn't been wearing a helmet.

It crunched his clavicle into four pieces.

He briefly passed out.

His friend called an ambulance.

Dad had surgery and about two weeks later was ready to be discharged from the Wuxi hospital and sent home to the United States.

That was my mission.

Get Dad out of the hospital and take his belongings on a train from Wuxi to Beijing, from where he'd have to fly home on his own.

Awhile after we'd boarded the train to Beijing, a commotion erupted ahead of us.

An announcement came over the speakers-one I'd believed was a Hollywood fabrication-asking if there was a doctor on the train because of an emergency in Car 8.

There wasn't.

But people who knew CPR stepped forward. They had to push through the voyeurs, jostling phones.

Some seated passengers asked them to clear the way.

I visualized a butterfly effect of Dad's accident, and people doing what we were seeing actually happen crowding around, phones out, cameras digitally sucking up every last drop of dignity of a dying person.

Without reason.

I'll confess, my journalistic instinct was to grab my phone.

But when it became apparent there was no news value in what seemed to be a natural death on a train, it proved better to respect this person's final moments.

He didn't seem to have a companion aboard.

But he likely has loved ones, somewhere.

They may have been his reason for being on board.

Mine was.

Unless our deaths are publicly significant, we deserve a de facto right to pass away with dignity-even in the smartphone era.

Contact the writer at erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/09/2017 page2)