The Watch That Calls For Help When You Can't

My father fell in the garage last Tuesday.

Not dramatically. He was reaching for something on a high shelf, the step stool shifted, and he went down sideways onto the concrete. He wasn’t badly hurt — a bruised hip, a scraped forearm, the particular indignity of not being able to get up easily. But the part that stayed with all of us wasn’t the fall.

It was the forty minutes he spent on the floor before anyone knew.

My mother was at the store. His phone was on the kitchen counter, where it always was, doing him no good at all. So he lay there on the cool concrete, working out the geometry of how to get himself up, and when he finally did, he didn’t tell anyone for two days. Because telling us meant something. It meant a conversation he didn’t want to have about what he could and couldn’t do alone anymore.

I understand that instinct completely. And I want to talk about it honestly, because there is a small piece of technology that speaks directly to those forty minutes — and most people dis…