Lord, don’t let me get sick -- or wake up in a body bag -- in Mississippi

Somehow, Friday became a real “Day of the Dead” day: First with the story about the gentleman in Mississippi who refused to shuffle off his mortal coil, and then with a story from Finland about a blood test that could tell you when death is near.

Combined with the rain in California, it’s enough to make you want to pull the covers back over your head until Monday!

In Lexington, Miss., the coroner had pronounced 78-year-old Walter Williams dead Wednesday; he was zipped into a body bag and transported to a local funeral home. That’s where the fun started. Before the embalming could begin, staff noticed the bag twitching. It was Williams, moving; or, as funeral director Byron Porter put it: “He was not dead, long story short.”

Indeed he wasn’t. Back in the hospital, on Friday he was pronounced in stable condition and was talking with family members.

This being the Bible Belt and all, Holmes County Coroner Dexter Howard had as good an explanation as any: “The bottom line is it’s a miracle.”

Now, I saw the 1980 U.S.-Soviet Olympic hockey game, so yes, I do believe in miracles. But just in case, I’m also going to say a simple little prayer tonight: “Lord, please don’t let me get sick in Mississippi.”

Really, though, for the rest of us still-living souls, the more intriguing story of death comes from my colleague Melissa Healy, who reported on a study published this week by Finnish and Estonian researchers.

It seems “they have identified specific levels of four chemicals circulating in the blood that offer a reliable signal that death is near. The four harbingers of death can be readily detected in a blood sample, and are even predictive when seen in apparently healthy people, their new study shows.”

But wait, there’s more!

“The study, released this week in the journal PLOS Medicine, suggests that several potentially deadly conditions — cancer, cardiovascular disease and a welter of non-vascular causes of death — may share signs, and even origins, that have been hidden in plain sight. If readily detectable physiological clues — called ‘biomarkers’ — could give warning of many dangerous conditions at once, a single blood test might provide a person early warning of a deadly threat, while it could still be averted (or at least delayed).”

Or, depending on what it showed, it could just really ruin your day.

Next to a fountain of youth, probably one of mankind’s most enduring quests is to know the future, and specifically, how long a future one might have. This blood test seems to hold the potential to at least partially answer that question.

So, would you take it?

I would. For years and years, I’ve heard people say that you should live every day like it’s your last. Trouble is, you never actually know which day is going to be your last. But if you could have, say, a five-year window (the time frame of the blood test study), and know that you were likely to die within that time — well, let’s just say that would put a little extra gitty in my gitty-up.

We all know we’re going. Even Walter Williams of Mississippi knows he can’t cheat the Grim Reaper forever.

But having a better idea of when? I’m for that.

Sure beats waking up in body bag.

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