"Final Breath"

May 12th, 2025

When I woke up I barely remembered arriving home. I lay there atop my covers, still in last night’s clothes, with my purse and keys discarded beside me, and only one sock on my foot. I don’t remember the drive at all. I’m lucky to have made it to my front door. (Which wasn’t locked when I dragged myself out of bed.)

Even now, my last shift feels like a bad dream. A nightmare I can’t bring myself to fully believe in. A nightmare I can’t force myself to write down.

In a few hours I’ll clean myself up, change into a fresh set of scrubs that don’t smell like death and disinfectant, and head out into the blazing late afternoon sun. I’ll drive myself to work, where I’ll go up to the second floor and find you laying in your room, resting. Face flush with life, breaths slow and calm. I’ll bring your food and ask how you’re feeling. I’ll go through the tests I have memorized by heart, and we’ll joke about how all of this is just one long, inconvenient vacation.

To imagine you anywhere else doesn’t bear thinking about. Blood clots can do a number on anyone, but that doesn’t mean they’re fatal. People have survived worse. It was all just a bad dream. You’re waiting for me to bring your meds. You’re waiting…

Maybe I should call in sick. Stay in bed and indulge in movies, chocolate, and wine until I’m forced to get up tomorrow.

But I can’t do that. There’s a small place inside me that’s free from the throws of denial, and it knows I have a duty.

I have to face the music.

May 12th, continued

I normally love night shifts. I normally hate them too. It’s the sort of push and pull that people say they find meaning in. A balance between two opposites or something like that.

Truth is, I don't care to feel anything at all right now, normal or otherwise.

Night shifts make anything seem possible. Sleep deprivation and the orange lit, near silent hallways thin the barrier between dreams and reality. Bleary eyed, I imagine I can make out your shadow in one of the doorways. Hand against the wall for support, plain hospital gown falling past your knees.

In this phantom, the film over your eyes has cleared. Your gaze pierces me like a spear, sure and perceptive. So clear. So certain of the fate that awaits you. More certain than I am. Even now, faced with the truth every time I pass your empty room.

“I’m sorry,” your mirage mouths, “I’m sorry. I’m right here.”

Here’s where the hate comes in. I’m so tired, I don’t have energy enough to delude myself into believing my own fantasies. Reality looms over me. Crystal clear and cackling.

When I arrived at work this evening you were still gone. No magical resurrection. No big cosmic prank revealed. Your body, what used to be you, is laying on a cold slab until the paperwork is filed and the funeral home can come pick you up.

I stare down that empty hallway past the desk I’ve been sitting at for the past hour, and a seething heat spreads through my gut, glutting itself on anger and guilt.

How could you leave me like that? After the senior doctors said you’d pull through. What kind of cruel, sick joke is that?

Janice came down to ask me how I was handling everything. I love the woman, but her speech on dealing with grief and a patient’s death felt like fog rolling over me. The sentiment grey through the haze of my exhaustion. The words lost to me like so much white noise.

She kept talking about the five stages of grief. I wanted to punch her. The irony of which is not lost on me.

Instead, I nodded, and hummed, and accepted her hug because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone dies. Accept the comfort. Accept that you have to move on.

Move on. What a funny notion.

My knuckles are bloodless with how tight I’m holding on.

May 14th, 2025

Janice convinced me to join her for drinks last night. I forgot how expensive everything is, how tight my nice clothes have gotten in the years I’ve neglected them. I felt a bit like a lettuce wrapped salmon. But I had as good a time as can be expected. Janice hit on a few men. A few even hit on me.

There was one. I can’t remember his name now for the life of me. By then the alcohol was really starting to set in. He had the sort of wide brown eyes that made him seem entirely innocent and lovable. Come to think of it, he resembled you in that way. But when I kissed him at the end of the night, all it tasted like was beer and those awful stale pretzels the bar serves. Nothing like how I imagined kissing you would have felt. How stupid is that?

I must have dozed off while Janice drove us home, because I had this dream that I was standing on a dock. The sky all bright and blue and spotless. I remember I could even feel the texture of the wood of the dock beneath my feet. The warmth from it baking under the sun.

I looked out at the water, and there was a little raft floating not far away. It listed to one side, and there you were, clinging to it with pale hands. The hair plastered to your face made you look like a drowned rat. (And even then you were beautiful.)

You called out to me, I think. But whatever you said was drowned out by a sudden burst of wind so cold and biting it seemed to suck all the heat from my body.

It was then that I realised I was holding a rope in my hands. Just for a second I felt the grit of it between my hands, before the wind tugged it away.

It slipped between my fingers, slapping into the water. A certainty came over me as I watched your life raft drift further and further away, pushed by the gale. The certainty that if I didn’t do something I’d lose you for good. But no matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t move. Not even a twitch.

You drowned. (And I woke up gasping like an idiot.)

Today I’m so hungover I can’t swallow without tasting the ghost of that gin and tonic and my own tears. Salty like the sea.

May 17th, 2025

Today I talked to your wife. I felt like a traitor, hugging her and helping her through the paperwork. Like there was something smug and rotten slithering under my skin. She cried so much. I don’t know if she’s stopped crying since you died.

Does that please you, wherever you are? To know that you’re missed? By your wife and kids, and even grandkids? Poor little things barely understood what was going on, but they cried all the same.

Does it please you that I miss you too?

I told your wife I was sorry. The god’s honest truth. If I’d been better at my job, if I’d been better at keeping my heart to myself, maybe you would still be here.

She looked at me with her tear filled eyes, and I swear she could see right through me. That just like the feverish image of you in the hallway, she pierced me with her sight alone like I was a butterfly on a board, and in doing so, saw all of my yearning spread across my ugly wings in splotches of black.

Your family told me you were a forgiving man, so forgive me this. Forgive me for not doing my job better. For not knowing how to fix you. Forgive me for letting your own blood strangle you.

Forgive me for wanting. I wanted…

It doesn’t matter what I wanted. All that matters is that your family gets through this. That your wife, in all her gut-wrenching sobs knows that you loved her to the last.

June 1st, 2025

When I was a little girl, I thought that love was the simplest thing in the world. Like giving a gift, or sharing my favorite teddy when my friend was crying. I thought love could be condensed into a single action that would fix everything. Blink and the clouds of despair would clear, and the sun could shine down unfettered upon a cured world.

But love, I’ve since learned, is a traitor. A pirate. A dandelion growing between cracks where it isn’t wanted. Growing no matter how thoroughly you think you’ve purged it.

I’m visiting Dan’s grave right now. Your grave.

The mosquitos are out in force. I can barely complete a sentence before I’m having to slap one away. But it’s worth it to have this moment.

It’s beautiful here. Calm and quiet. There’s a tree not far away. Crab apple I think. The white blossoms fall when the wind blows, showering this corner of the graveyard in snowy white. I can imagine how it must smell here in the fall. The rotten tang of fallen apples filling the air. Must be nice.

I wish… I wish I didn’t have to love. Or rather, I wish that love were like the stars, visible and shining, but distant. So far away it could never cause us harm, but bright enough we can still appreciate its beauty.

You weren’t like the stars at all. You reminded me of my grandparent’s old horse. Which when I write it out, doesn’t sound like a compliment, but bear with me.

His name was Chester. Being a young girl craning her neck up towards that creature, I was gripped with fear. Of his size and strength, of his big muddy hooves. But when he bent down to sniff me, the warmth of his fuzzy nose brushing my cheek, the fear evaporated. The gentleness of that creature encompassed all. I could see it in those soft eyes that peered out from behind his mane.

It’s the eyes.

That’s what I liked best about you, Dan. Your eyes. How your spirit seemed to reach out through them to everyone you spoke with. How you comforted your wife when she visited or called. God, I was envious of her, to be loved like that. That you had the strength in your pain to hold her hand and lead her through her fear.

I’m sorry it was me holding your hand, and not your wife, when you passed. I’m sorry I stole that final kiss from your brow, and not her.

My grandmother once described death like the stroke of a blade. So swift and sudden and clean that we’re shocked into numbness. Left reeling, desperately trying to comprehend what’s happened.

For me, death is slowly boiling water, and we the innocent, oblivious frogs. Its fingers creep in and surround us, invisible until the moment that the arms close, and our loved ones are swept away in that cloak of darkness. An embrace we don’t realize we’re all in until it’s too late.

I hope that in your final breaths, my embrace was enough to stave off the sting of death.

I’ve brought you some dandelions. I found them on my walk here. They’re not much but… They’re all I could find.

Your wife has set out some lovely peonies. They make my modest offering feel dull. But then, what good does it do to compare myself to a dead man’s wife?

I won’t ask you to wait for me on the other side. My love was like these dandelion’s; sprouting through the cracks. Feeding on the cast-off light of your love for your wife. She’s a good woman. The woman you chose. Your love reflects in her. I think that if your spirit is walking with anyone, it’s her.

In the end, my job is to witness. Injury, illness, life, death, love. What I give cannot be received. I send to people the help and strength that leads them back into their own lives. I cannot keep what I build in them. In the end, I have no right or claim to it. I am simply the scaffolding.

And that’s okay. Through gritted teeth, and teary eyes, and an aching heart, it’s okay, because that’s what I chose.