Let there be Kindly Spoken Truth

“There’s no dead like redhead dead.”

I hadn’t thought about it before. But, baseline lack of pigment plus sudden stop of blood flow really is quite shocking.

I wonder what I’ll look like dead. It’s a strange thought. We’re both redheads. Maybe she wonders, too.

As he is dying, outside his window we see a stretcher with a body being wheeled to the temporary morgue that sits right outside his room.

We laugh. It’s not funny, exactly, but in a macabre sort of way, we need to laugh. It feels good.

We stand, the three of us, one on each side and one at his feet; each of us with our hands on him.

He dies before his heart gives up. We wait for the electrical signal to get the message and catch up with the rest of his body. It takes a while.

It’s strange, actually, the idea of “pulseless electrical activity”.

I realize a few minutes in that had we not had a monitor, we’d have called his time of death a while before.

As we watch the electrical activity wane, I say: “I wish I’d had time to give him more drugs.”

I pause.

Is that true? That I wish that? I’m not sure.

“But, then, you also don’t want to rob someone of their experience of dying, you know?” I muse.

R nods emphatically. “EXACTLY. That was one of the hardest things for me about COVID, you know? So many people died in the twilight zone.”

S pipes up: “Yeah. You want them to be comfortable, but not… out of it.”

I wonder if some pain and fear were meant to be part of his death experience.

I wonder often if we are robbing people of the sacred experience of their own death, the way we keep people alive for so long past what is normal for their body. I wonder if our aversion to pain and suffering at the end of life is the right thing.

It’s difficult to watch someone suffocate. All our instincts are to rescue. To help. To intervene.

There is panic as they realize they cannot breathe deeply. There is wide-eyed fear as they gasp.
You see blue, that changes to purple, that gives way to dusky grey.

And then as if a switch flips, they go limp.

It’s so… quick… the transition from alive to dead.

So permanent in a world where everything seems quite the opposite of that.

We hold his hands. S wipes his face, beaded with sweat, with a cool cloth.

I stroke his hair with my gloved hand. It strikes me as callous, suddenly, the barrier between my hand and his body.

We do our best to assuage his fear.

“Rest easy, my friend.” R says.

S’s eyes fill with tears. “It must be the music.” she says, almost apologetically.
We have some of D’s favorites playing in the background. Kris Kristofferson.

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s all of it. The gravity of this place. The tears we don’t allow ourselves to shed.
The way death seems so gruesome and unfair sometimes. The way you come to work every day prepared to be part of a stranger’s last moments.

“It’s so quiet in here,” S murmurs. “I haven’t heard the phone ring or anything.”

She’s right. It’s strangely peaceful. Everything around us in this environment of chaos seems to have evaporated except this man we hardly know and the three of us.

We watch a sort of mania overtake him as the hypoxia sets in; watch him reach for things we cannot see; wonder what they are; marvel and feel curious about the moment we can see he has left us, though his body hangs on for a while longer.

“Should we call it?” R asks.

“Yeah,” I say, “I suppose so.”

“1640.”

“I’m glad you guys are here with me.” I say.

I really mean it.

They murmur their agreement.  The load feels lighter together. More bearable.

The moment feels special; sacred in its own strange way.

R and I get his body ready for the morgue. Remove the monitors, the IVs, and zip him into a plastic bag.

The bag has a weird, awful smell.  

“Don’t you dare zip me into a plastic bag, R.” I say with a grin.

“Don’t worry,” she says, laughing. “I won’t.”

Another macabre joke, but we both know I’m serious.

I call his sister. I call the donor hotline. I cross all the things of the “post-mortem checklist”.

They take D’s body to the morgue.

And down the hall we go, to another grieving family.

“I hate this ICU” a family member says to me, his eyes swollen, his face strewn with tears.

“I don’t blame you.” I say.

“I lost my wife here in July.” He points to an adjacent room.

 Ugh. There are no words.

I bring tissues. Ice water. A cool facecloth. Offer a chair.

R and J hustle around the room, adjusting things, hanging new drips, etc.

And then it’s 1900. He doesn’t die before we leave. But he will soon.

I walk out into the post-sunset light, breathe deeply, adjust to the outside-the-hospital air.

It feels as though my day was a dream. An alternate reality. It feels impossible that this world, of hustle and “normalcy” into which I walk, can coexist with what our day was.

And then I remind myself that it’s a just a piece of one big universal puzzle. I let the picture be fuzzy, and focus on this: In each piece, let there be truth and kindness, so that perhaps one day, the entire picture will be just that.