Hello 911? A ceiling fan killed my husband

We have a handsome new ceiling fan in the living room. The five blades are thick, dark-reddish wood, extending out 62 inches from a dark bronze hub, and beautifully concave. Mark, our electrician, installed it this morning then turned it on. Compared to the old fan, the blades’ rotation was lazy.

“Turn it up to high,” Karen said. Mark looked at the remote control. “It is on high,” he said. We checked the remote, and, sure enough it was on high. “It’s moving a lot of air,” Mark said. “If it turned any faster than that,” I said, eying the prodigious blades, “the house would take off.”

It is a vast improvement over the old fan, which had 52-inch blades with the wicker-look inserts, but did not hold its proportional weight in the space, which features a vaulted ceiling and a massive ridgepole beam spanning the width of the room. This new fan reminds me of the noxious commercial where the cool couple sits across the desk from the mega-cool designer, who asks, “And what can I do for you?” And the woman, who was either highly paid or had no idea how idiotic this made her look, sets a faucet fixture on the desk and says, “Design a house around this.”

You could have designed our living room around this new ceiling fan. But we didn’t exactly go looking for it. The old fan would still be with us if I hadn’t single-handedly destroyed it last week. That fan had a pull chain that I had used successfully for years to change its speed. It had three speeds: low, medium, high. It was on medium, and Karen, on a warm evening, asked me to change it to high. “Three clicks,” I said. “Low, off, high.” I reached up and pulled the chain.

I don’t exactly know what happened next. I felt the chain knob slip free of my fingers. That has happened before. The chain, freed, arced upward. That has happened before. Then something happened. The motor housing, above the blades, started turning with the blades. The entire unit was rotating. Karen yelled, “It’s unscrewing at the top!” “What?” I yelled, transfixed by the rotating motor housing. “Unscrewing! At the top!” She yelled something about what I should do, but I yelled back, “Shut up!” I shouldn’t have done that, but I needed time to think. I ran to get a dining chair, climbed on it, and tried to stop the fan turning. I looked up at the beam and saw that the drop rod had become completely unscrewed from the beam housing. The fan had dropped about a foot and was hanging suspended only by its wiring.

I stared at the wiring and wondered if my death would come from electrocution, or fan blade blows, or falling off the chair, or telling Karen to shut up. Then the fan stopped. I let it go. I climbed off the chair. Karen spared me. Probably not 60 seconds had passed. It seemed like an eternity.

In the aftermath, I surmised that the chain must have arced just high enough to be caught by the blade hub, around which it wrapped, jamming into the clearance between the hub and the motor housing. And then the motor housing started to turn. There was no way to intervene. Before I was finished thinking about it, I had developed a bit of pride in myself, in the sense of contributing to a highlight reel. It was like the time I almost drowned when my water ski tips got pointed down, just as the towrope handle got trapped between my legs. That was a long time ago. But you remember.