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The suit that Ed Smalling would wear as he lay in his coffin was hanging on the back of the kitchen door.
Through the night, his wife and two children had called relatives - including his four grandchildren - to tell them of his passing.
The Town of Babylon had lowered a flag to half staff out of respect for its former employee, and the funeral director already had agreed to pick up Smalling's body from Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip.
Then the unthinkable happened. More than seven hours after Adeline Smalling learned of her husband's death, the doctor who had phoned her with the news called her West Babylon home a second time.
The doctor apologized. Ed Smalling, he told her, wasn't dead.
"There was this feeling of complete anger," their daughter, Michelle Moglia of Westhampton, said yesterday. "We didn't even know until we got to the hospital what the mix-up was. Did they take him down to the morgue and he just sat up and said, 'Hello, here I am?'"
Those initial fears proved unfounded. The night before, the doctor had called the hospital and spoken with a nurse about the status of several patients, he told the Smalling family later, and he or the nurse had simply confused Ed Smalling with another patient who had passed away.
Now, a month later, Ed Smalling, 73, has stabilized and is living in a nursing home for the first time, though he is paralyzed and unable to speak because of two strokes he suffered years ago, Moglia said. And Adeline Smalling, 64, is suing Good Samaritan Hospital, saying the erroneous report has caused emotional and physical trauma.
She has started taking blood pressure medication for the first time, she said yesterday, and is having trouble managing her diabetes.
Given his health, Moglia said, the news that her father had died wasn't a shock. The doctor, Yin Lee Chin of Lindenhurst, had warned the family that Smalling, unable to keep food down and suffering from internal bleeding, could die at any time.
So when the first phone call came, with news that her husband of 45 years had died, "we cried a lot, but then my son said to me, 'Mom, Daddy's not suffering any more,'" said Adeline Smalling. "Then all of a sudden, Daddy's alive, again. It was impossible to absorb ... I was in a fog. It was like the Twilight Zone."
Good Samaritan spokeswoman Christine Hendriks, however, suggested the Smalling family was misdirecting its anger, or at least its lawsuit, over the July 22 incident. "This matter involves communication between a patient's personal physician and the family," she said. "Since this matter is currently involved in litigation, we cannot comment any further."
Chin did not return calls seeking comment.
The Smallings' attorney, Andrew Siben of Bay Shore, had the hospital served on Aug. 13 with a copy of the complaint filed in State Supreme Court.
"Good Samaritan Hospital does a lot of good work, but like a lot of hospitals, they are often filled beyond capacity," Siben said. "Obviously, the problem was a breakdown of communication, but it affected a family when they were at their most vulnerable."
Adeline Smalling said the second round of phone calls to relatives was just as traumatic as the first, with relatives asking questions she didn't yet know the answer to about how such a mistake could be made.
And the flag, lowered in the honor of his 41 years of service in the Babylon highway department?
"It went right back up," Adeline Smalling said. "Believe me."
Then, she and her children put the deed for the funeral plot the Smallings had purchased back into a drawer, went to Siben's office, and then to the hospital.
"The doctor kept saying he was sorry," Adeline Smalling said. "But sorry doesn't really cut it."
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