last breaths

One minute I'm administering IV antibiotics to a patient with severe cardiac arrythmias who is suffering from total liver failure. The truth is I have little clue what I'm doing. I know this little plastic bag is full of some chemical concoction. This concoction was discovered by some scientist in a lab who found it to be useful to kill bacteria. He applied drops to a slide and watched little asymmetrical figures die. A doctor read his report, listened to some pharmeceutical salesman convince him that this particular molecular arrangement was best to rid people of small organisms which are identified by long Latin names that exclude the world at large from knowing what doctors are talking about. I read his order. I hang the bag, and make sure the tube flowing into the patient's arm doesn't have air bubbles in it.

I hate to admit it, but it's true: I typically spend more time staring at equipment than the person in the bed in front of me. This is why I felt like an idiot when the minutes which succeeded the minute when I infused this liquid involved witnessing my first patient die.

I had seen dead patients in school, but they weren't "mine". Now, I was there with my first dead patient and I hadn't even seen it coming. I could blame it on any number of things, but the truth is it shocked me because it was work. I'm not really all that different from the average person. I show up at a building that "contains" the activities which compose my job. I slide a card through a little red box on the wall, it beeps, I ride the elevator to whatever floor I'm supposed to work on. I do the same activities over and over again night after night. To the people in the rooms these are vitally important activities. I agree, only once you've hung hundreds of IV bags and passed so many of the same pills to so many different patients, these vitally important activities become routine.

Then a patient's breaths slow down, and there I am checking tubing for air bubbles.

After the patient breaths one last time, and the family grieves for a few minutes, we go to care for the body. For minute my routine became meaningless. When you stand in front of a body that's been part of this gestalt presence we call a soul, you can't help but realize whatever look is on your face must appear quite stupid. There's not much to say at that moment. You stare at what had been a "life" for 70+ years, and now you have nothing but a bunch of questions. In church we speak of all these grand ideas like heaven and hell, God, 'the spiritual realm', and at least for me it always seemed like a fairy tale. We talk about the spiritual realm in church, but its all nothing compared to standing in the presence of that eerie moment we call death.

Nursing is all about doing menial activities that preserve life. Then respirations stop and all the questions I go through life avoiding are right there in front of me. The little things I get paid to preoccupy myself with all fade away for a minute, and suddenly faith comes to center stage and waits for a judgment on my part. What do I think happens when the breaths quit coming?

It's difficult for me to say what it was in the room that night. Is it my subconscious suddenly being disquieted? The room felt different. I feel like any interpretation I would try to give that feeling would be a blasphemy of the moment. It was more than just the stirring of man's ultimate questions within me, but it was not something I would ever feel comfortable reducing to 'churchy' language. Orthodoxy in the face of a dead person becomes a form of lunacy.

I feel as though I left that room feeling more certain about God, but ultimately knowing less about him. Maybe it was just that the things I've never understood about him resonated more loudly. I was now deprived of the ability to ignore what had proved thus far to be to difficult to think about. I wanted to cry. I felt bad for the family that now lost the presence of one whom had loved them. This person that had been a source of memory and meaning was now gone.

I'm almost 25 now. One third the age of that patient. I thought last night of how many different phases my life has been through. I thought of how distant those phases seem from each other, almost like they were divided up into different scenes whose backdrops were totally disconnected, and I played a different character in each. What if I lived to be 900 years old like the mythical men of the Old Testament? Would life have any sense of continuity? Would I die as one person or as a hundred different people? I think every age has longed for something that is continuous, we all want an absolute whether we believe in one or not. When the mundane is interupted by temporality, I with all my youth find myself haunted by the stillness of the question of God. In every routine, religious or secular, we busy ourselves with activities that numb us to wondering what is Real. We drive to work. Mow the grass. Cook meals. We do everything we know we are supposed to do to aid the next breath in coming. Then the breaths stop, and I am dumbfounded by the inquiry whether there is the breath of a Creator that continues to inspire my life after atmospheric exchange has ceased.

I'm not saying I don't have faith, only that the cliche faith statements we all too casually make are quite incomplete when another person dies. I'm saying that my faith wants more than the doctrinal myths and cheap dogmatisms we employ describing the God beyond, his character, and his desires.