Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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2001; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1067/men.2001.115769

1527-2966

R Rath,

Life's cessation showed on the cryptic readout of the EKG. The monitor alarm sounded. The sharp black peaks etched on the graph paper collapsed into the cursive of death...a flat line. The monitor squeaked slightly, the paper ran out on the floor. Feet of spiraling paper marked the end of a human being's existence. The world kept spinning. It did not stop on its axis to let him off, while his wife cried silently in the corridor, tissue held to her nose like a wilted flower. Another social security number to recycle. Should I pray? Go on with my business? Spots of blood from futile IV starts dried on my scrubs. Did this uniform entitle me to immunity from death and feeling? Why did it always affect me when a patient died? Sometimes I would hold my breath as long as I could, wondering why the body kept right on breathing without my permission. The heart never ceasing in its rhythm....until death. It decides when to stop, not us. My own death is unthinkable. Once in a while it will come to mind and I feel horrified and alone. Picturing my demise terrifies me. Endless, dark sleep. Underground. I would grope for my faith in God like a drowning man. God. An opiate. There had to be life after death, right? Otherwise life seems so worthless and futile. Why did God put us here just to die? There must be more. He loves us—our complexities have to live on in some invisible force. Forcing myself to think of what I had been told about the supernatural, I desperately tried to reassure myself of the possibilities of continuation. And to live forever? Just as unfathomable as death itself. Was the man who just died still in the room? Bobbing along the ceiling tiles—seeing his children sob and feeling helpless? Or was he with God already...planning his endless future? I opened the window just in case. Why get stuck in a room? I would often feel the hair on my arms stiffen and rise on the nape of my neck as someone's spirit would brush me hurrying to get out of the room. Some die alone in alleyways or lonely apartments. The dead don't care. Sometimes the living don't care. I had seen homeless people die in obscurity. A few stamped out cigarette butts in their dirty jacket pockets. Scraps of paper. Maybe even a joint...a driver's license to tell us who he had been. Closing the chapter on an unpublishable book no one would read. The coroner would come to pick up the remains, not out of respect, but to carve out the answer. No one would care how he died. No one even knew that he had died. Gathering the EKG strip from the floor, I held proof of a life ended. A terse farewell. I took some of the strip home, pulling it out as I walked into the kitchen, letting the screen door slam. I unrolled it and watched the lines jump across the paper. Each peak and valley had teased his crying family, becoming farther apart and erratic. The heart coughed and sputtered, unable to support the weight of his life any longer. Enough histrionics. Finally, he took his last breath. All of this recorded in a macabre cursive on the paper in my hands. I remembered the “Dead Guy.” One gray, razor-cold day, a neighbor boy stood in awe in the foyer of my apartment, looking through the leaded glass. “There's a Dead Guy over there!” A Dead Guy? Where? The Dead Guy lay in the driveway across the street, a look of astonishment on his cold, blue face. His eyes glassed over and unblinking, snow in the corner of his mouth, icy frost on his nose hairs, a too-tight ring on his puffy finger. God knows how long he had lain there, staring. One minute he was walking through the yard and onto the driveway, the next he was gone. No time to say prayers. He had been discovered by a lazy school kid walking home, chewing gum and toting a book bag over his shoulder. He saw the Dead Guy in the driveway next to his house. What a find! He bent over the body and coaxed a few words. Nothing. A slice of fear flashed through him. It was like the horror movies he watched. He was desensitized. He had seen decapitations and eviscerations. This frozen old man was nothing! The rescue squad arrived. Everyone walking, not running. He was dead, all right. Stiff. His tattered wallet pulled from his pocket revealed who he once was. No one knew him. I had been in my warm apartment while he lay out there in frozen bliss for hours. It hadn't affected my world at all. Until now. The makeshift fanfare drifted away. Back to their stoves and televisions. The Dead Guy made no lasting impression, not like Days of Our Lives or the chicken browning in a skillet. All alone, frozen to the blacktop, without even the dignity of holding people's interest. The world hadn't bowed or stopped when he died. A rookie cop stayed behind to watch him until the coroner arrived. Watching a Dead Guy. As if he would escape. The cop hunched against the cold blasts of wind, bored. He pictured his own death, flat on his back, frozen to a driveway, and shuddered. He thought of his young wife and the fight they had had that morning. He pushed the thought away. Born to die. If there is a life after death, there should be a life before birth where God can ask, “Do you want to be born? Do you want to feel pain and helplessness and a little sprinkling once in a while of happiness? Do you want to live your life knowing that death awaits at any given time?” It would only seem fair. The nurse in the snow. I had nothing to pull out of my bag of nurse tricks. No pulses to take. No IVs to start. No magical potion. I, too, walked away. The Dead Guy's hand was stuck in an eternal spread-fingered wave as if to dismiss me. I said aloud, “Goodbye...and good luck....” The police officer's eyes turned from the driveway and locked on me quizzically. The Dead Guy might not have had anyone who cared that he had ceased to exist, but he would live forever inside of me. I did not explain to the officer that I helped spirits to be free, that I opened windows to let them through. Nursing school did not prepare us for the dying. Fresh-faced, idealistic, and naive, we were healers. Death wore boots at times...marching in, announcing its arrival. Other times quietly sneaking and stealing breath by surprise. Sometimes death could even be a friend...putting an end to deep moans of pain, soothing a wasting body to sleep. I prayed for death sometimes, when I had done everything I could and still there was brutal suffering. When each treatment we brandished became a punishment and degradation. When the mind was totally gone but the heart remained strong. That is when I would invite death in, the antithesis of all my efforts, to release the soul and close the book.