A Death in Year Three

By the time I began my emergency medicine rotation, I had come a long way from making that first tremulous incision into a cadaver during anatomy class. Back then, at the beginning of first year, I remember trying to conceal my apprehension as we removed an opaque plastic sheet from the supine body.

We had all prepared for this moment, as a class and in our own ways, but still my heart raced as we uncovered first the feet, then the legs, then the torso, like an outgoing tide slowly revealing hidden details of a beach or rocky shore. Once the sheet was fully lifted from the body, the face remained shrouded by a damp cloth. We would get into that later in the course.

Less than three years later, I had been around a fair amount of death. I had seen children born without brains on pediatrics, known people who died in code-blues on the internal medicine floors, and seen others bleed out on the operating table during surgery.

In the emergency department we got a bit of everything, and one night a call came in from an approaching ambulance carrying a teen-aged female in cardiac arrest. They didn’t tell us anything more, and in the eerie minutes before the ambulance arrived doctors and nurses took their places and we got one of the trauma bays ready with IVs, medications, and intubation equipment. There was a respiratory technician student there as well, and we both positioned ourselves behind our respective instructors, close enough to be available if called upon, but far enough to be out of the way. (...)

The mind is a real place. Thoughts and memories not only guide our actions, but they can change the pace of our heart, the rate of our breathing, even the size of our pupils. That we live on in the thoughts of others may offer little consolation in the face of one’s own death, but what could be more important than the half-hidden tracks we leave upon the minds of those close to us, and the marks they leave, in turn, on us.

It is little wonder that preoccupation with mortality and existential angst go hand in hand with underlying feelings of disconnectedness and isolation. Little wonder one of the most terrifying things about death for the famously withdrawn Philip Larkin is “nothing to love or link with.” Little wonder baby monkeys choose the cloth-covered figure over the wire one with food. Or, at least, little wonder we are moved by that gesture.

by Caleb Gardner, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: "The Doctor", Sir Luke Fildes. 1891. Wikimedia Commons.