I never know how to tell them.
Is it their eyes, large and watering? Their faces, sunken and desperate? Their shoulders, slumping as if the world rested its heavy hands upon them?
Whatever it is, it’s difficult as hell. Sometimes I lie to their faces, which makes it easier for me and harder for them. Selfish, right? Maybe. But at least it buys me time.
Today, I silently watch a patient’s heart beat slow gradually on the monitor, hands behind my back. Moonlight streams from the drawn curtains, casting shadows on the walls as my assistants disconnect his oxygen provider. Just another victim of the plague.
Beep, beep-beep, beep…. His wife buries her head in her hands and sobs quietly in the corner. Tattered rags make up her attire; I realize it’s never the wealthy class who accumulates the plague. Always the poor. Death can be choosy, yes? Beep-beep, beep… I’ve never had so much trouble informing someone of inevitable death as much as I did with her. No matter how many times I instructed her to stay out, she practically dropped to her knees and begged me to allow her to hear her husband’s final heartbeats. I guess that’s love, huh? Not that I’m any expert of it. Beep, beep-beep… I’m already accustomed to averting my eyes, resting them on the monitor instead of the devastated woman. Ignore the wails. Ignore the pleas. I repeat this over in my head. Beep, beep... To take my mind off things, I compare the dimming, drooping lines on the screen to natural landforms we only see within ancient snapshots (paintings are rare to salvage nowadays). This man’s, in my mind, is a jagged, shallow river. I recall a patient’s monitor lines earlier that day resembled staccato, high peaked mountains.
Beep…
The thing about being a doctor is that you never know exactly when the last breath will come. You learn life is stubborn. Death is unrelenting.
But when that final gasp of air does materialize from a gaping mouth, it’s ghostly; wraithlike. A sudden inhalation in the dark, followed by loud crying in the distance. A proclamation of ending.
However, life for me, Dr. Moore, never ends, unlike the patient’s limp, emaciated figure before me. It’s all routine. The nurses huddle in with vacant faces and heave the body outside to make room for the next patient, who will most likely obtain the same fate. Numbness shadows within my chest, an empty, meaningless condolence is offered to the grieving family, and I finally step outside the room to my office to update files.
Mundane. Monotonous. I’ve lost track of how many souls I’ve lost under my supervision and released like butterflies to God knows where.
I wonder sometimes if Heaven ever complains of over-crowding.
As I mechanically stamp gleaming red X’s on terminated files of fluttering lives, the thought lingers more than ever before.