Accidental Pathway

Two friends told me yes­ter­day that as the moment of their dying approached they felt noth­ing but peace and antic­i­pa­tion and curios­ity. I was unex­pect­edly moved. Don had been thrown off a pole by 20,000 volts. As the first respon­der worked on him, his only thought was “leave me alone. I want to see what this is”. Kelly was dead for ten min­utes and was get­ting CPR in an ICU. Believe me, few peo­ple are deader than the sce­nario this paints. He said he came to a state of unbe­liev­able peace and he said he had a dis­tinct choice about whether to go back. He came back and he doesn‘t know why because every­thing he was expe­ri­enc­ing was only good. An ICU in the midst of a code is, uh, not peace­ful, not good. He came back though, chose to come back.

I arrived at the ER on Fri­day. A car crossed the line, hit another car on a snowy road. Nine peo­ple on the way to the ER. This was the first. Out of the blue my patient‘s heart stopped beat­ing on the heli­copter ride in from the wreck. He was, right­fully, get­ting the full treat­ment in the ER – a medic was lean­ing into the heart com­pres­sions. Ribs broke, which is typ­i­cal if the com­pres­sions are effec­tive enough to actu­ally move blood through reluc­tant ves­sels. We went through the algo­rithms we were taught: col­lapsed lung: no. mis­placed air­way tube: no. fluid around the heart: no cat­a­strophic injury to a great ves­sel: maybe, but we could not find it, and he kept dying. Then he did die. I don‘t know how exactly, which has both­ered me. I did not have a great answer for his wife in the office yes­ter­day when she looked at me blankly. She was bruised and her bones had been shaken like dice in bag. I had not yet heard from my friends.

This acci­den­tal jour­ney
turns itself and looks back at me.
It rides me, hard.
The crop swishes past my wild wide eyes
and I am hurtling through no time at all.
My desire, your desire, to tran­scend the end,
or at least to be there for it,
has not even the time to form itself into a scream
before the crop cracks and dri­ves the race past us,
still, mute at the momen­tary parade.