An Old Friend

Trying to feel human again in a place where death never clocks out.

Proud to share my son’s writing as today’s guest post,any Buy Me a Coffee support goes directly his way.

I’m currently sitting in the break room of my intensive care unit I’m a part of. The vinyl chair sighs when I lean back. The air reeks of bleach wipes and coffee that has been sitting in the pot too long to be considered

safe for human consumption. There’s a metallic tang to it, the kind that clings to the back of your tongue and won’t leave. The faint sound of laughter rings through the hall, not the happy laughter but the barred laughter you can only hear after a code. It’s

laughter used like sandbags, stacked high against a flood. I had to step out for a moment, not because something unusual happened, but too much of the usual. There’s a stillness that lingers that follows the sounds of a ventilator being shut off. You try to

move on to chart, to clean, to reset the room, but that stillness can overwhelm you. Even the gloves feel heavier, the trash can lid slower on its hinge. So you sit, listening to the dull sounds of monitors under the artificial and overwhelming lights, and try to make sense of what it has made of you.

We had a patient come in a few days ago, they were found unresponsive and their diagnosis is grim. Family photos were still taped to the bedside, faces smiling at a future that didn’t arrive. Before the family could evenmake it in from out of town, the healthcare equivalent of vultures was already flying in. The organ donation team. They aren’t bad people, in fact, I like talking to a few of them. The part that is hard for me is how this team of “specialists” fly in fromacross state in their private jets and padded wallets to pressure families into something from a Mary Shelley book. Clipboards like shields, consent forms like tightropes Another coworker came up to me the other day and told me her daughter is a mortician,and how these organ donation teams are all about speed and have no disregard in preserving any dignity. The living argue in whispers while the dead keep their secrets.

What a dilemma, huh? The kind that keeps you awake even when your body begs for sleep.

Death is weird to me. I grew up watching my mom’s family experience what could only be described as a curse. There were several years when I saw her family more at funerals than not. Of course, I never understood it at that age; nobody does. I hate to admit

it, but sometimes I looked forward to funerals as it meant a lot of food, ham rolls, Jell-O salads, Styrofoam plates that bent in the middle: a communion of casseroles.. Morbid, right? Then, for a while there, it felt as if this curse had been lifted. I went

through the rest of grade school with really no memories of deaths. Once I finished high school, I moved away. Distance felt like an antidote.

I found a home for a year in Billings, MT as a fry cook. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it allowed me to keep living. Grease pop symphonies, ticket rails clacking, a secondhand apron that always smelled like Friday .Once I realized my time there was done, I

packed up and moved to Idaho. This is where I encountered some of the hardest things a 19-year-old could witness. The second day I moved there, I had already lined up a job interview at a disaster restoration business. The next day I began working. This job

consisted of cleaning up “disasters”. Most of the time small things, Grandma left the sink running and flooded the bathroom. Other times an outlet sparked and burned a wall before being extinguished. Then on the rare occasion came the body clean ups... I never

knew this was even in the job description, but the paycheck at this place left me asking no questions. It’s amazing how quickly you can sign away parts of yourself you didn’t know were negotiable.

Something not a lot of people tell you is how quickly you can become desensitized to something so barbaric. The things that I saw at this job would make your toes curl just imagining them, nonetheless, being there in person.

Someone’s whole world reduced to plastic and bleach. Soon, the pit that would arise in my stomach in the morning when I heard we were heading towards a body clean-up disappeared. I would get home at night and stand emotionless in the shower trying to take

this massive trauma and just ball it up and tuck it away. Hot water as absolution that never quite absolved. I think at some point you learn to disconnect the situation from the person. It’s hard for a person at such a young age to know how to feel with all

that shit. I think there finally came a point where I had to just be stoned as often as possible to avoid my feelings. Then Covid hit, a word that arrived like a siren and never turned off.

Things got crazy there for a while and it didn’t take long for my job to tell me I was no longer needed. Fuck. Jobless, alone, in a state 17 hours away from family. Boxes in the backseat, pride in the glove box, I went

back home. Not long after, I got a call one night that my grandpa might be dead and someone had to go see for sure. The 30 minute drive over was filled with so many conflicting feelings. I just spent the last 9 months cleaning up after dead bodies; so this

is nothing to me, right? But this is my grandpa, isn’t this supposed to be everything to me? Well, I got there and he was in fact dead. I just sat there, while all the rest of the family came. I found myself again tucking these feelings in so the rest of my

family had someone to lean on in that moment. I wore steadiness like armor, and it fit too well. The funeral was hard for my family but once again, I found myself just feeling nothing. Around 6 months after the funeral, my grandmother passed away from Covid.

Nobody knew she was sick, in fact, we didn’t even know she was intubated for the last month of her life. Instead of grief, I just felt enraged. I felt enraged that I couldn’t even tell her goodbye. I didn’t get a last hug, a last conversation, nothing. She

was just gone, and I was left to just figure out how to go on without her.

Now that I work in the healthcare field, horror stories about Covid float around occasionally. The unit I work in is filled with people who run headfirst into codes and spend every day saving lives. These people seriously

seem like real life superheroes some days. Yet, whenever covid is brought up, these larger-than-life personalities sink back, and those vacant eyes take their place. I recognize those eyes as the same one I had once known in that small Idaho town. Nobody here

likes to talk about Covid. It’s almost an unspoken rule to not mention it. Silence does what words can’t: it points to a wound we’re still guarding.

Finally, after enough prying, my charge nurse opened up to me. She started off the conversation by telling me whatever I think about how it went; it was fifty times worse. She told me that people from all ages were dying left and right. Some days, five to ten

people would take their last labored breath. Nurses would drop left and right from pure exhaustion. Covid did not discriminate, it would find its way into someone’s lungs and kill them, as simple as that. Another coworker who is a traveler chimed in around

this point. She was in New York during Covid and she said every person who was in that hospital with her suffers from severe PTSD. The amount of death she saw couldn’t even be quantified. Both her and my charge nurse said so many people’s last words were,

“Covid is a hoax.”

Hard to think about, right? That’s like being shot in the heart and your last words being, “Guns aren’t real!” How stupid can people be? How can your politics be so engrained into you that you outright deny the thing putting

you six feet deep? Maybe they’ll teach me that in nursing school. Maybe they’ll teach me how to argue with fear dressed up as certainty.

A few months back I had a patient who couldn’t stay out of the hospital. They had a bad case of COPD. Within maybe a month and a half, they went from living independently to not being able to be off the oxygen for longer

than 30 seconds. After about 2 weeks of staying in the ICU, she made the decision to move to hospice care. This was one of my first patients who I had been completely involved in her care the entire time she was here. On her last day she asked her family to

step out of the room so she could talk to me privately. Once they walked out, she asked me to sit, to which I obliged. She looked me right in the eyes, grabbed my hands, and thanked me for everything. Her fingers were paper-thin, but her grip was sure; for

a moment, the room felt like a chapel. She told me the dignity I gave her could never be thanked enough.

That was the first time I broke down working here. I had to sit in the break room, just like now, and let myself feel those emotions instead of balling them up. These emotions are what make me human. They’re what make

me a better person. It’s strange that it took the death of someone I hardly knew to teach me that, but how lucky am I to finally understand. Compassion isn’t free; it charges interest, and you pay it in tears.

So, I say to all of you, let yourself feel these difficult emotions, and let them make you a better person. Don’t crumble in the face of death, embrace it and feel what so many people say you shouldn’t. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to write about here. All

these years I’ve spent balling up my emotions and feelings around death have done me no good. Instead of letting myself feel nothing, I think it’s healthier to feel everything. It’s human to cry, to ball up under your covers and weep until the tears stop.

It’s human to open that tub of ice cream and eat the whole thing just to feel something. It’s human to feel everything. Feeling isn’t weakness; it’s proof the heart is still at work.

My break is coming to an end now, so I need to find a way to finish this, though no ending feels right. My writing isn’t supposed to be perfect; I just want it to be real. I want you all to feel the real things I feel.

I appreciate you all taking the time out of your busy schedules to read this and reflect. Lastly, check on the people around you. Text them at 2 a.m. and tell them you love them. Call that sibling you’ve been fighting with and tell them you miss them. Don’t

let things go unsaid, because you never know when that old friend, Death, will make his rounds.