The Spirit Clouds

• Sensitive content- Covid Pandemic Deaths.

Despite of all my good intentions and silent whispered prayers, the man still died alone in the small hours of the morning. He was there when I stepped onto the makeshift Covid ICU for my shift at 7am. Someone on the night shift had placed a towel over his face and disconnected the intravenous lines but, he still looked lonely and untended. I had an irrational thought to place a blanket over his lower body, lest he get chilled but then the blaring alarm of a ventilator a few beds down jolted me into clarity.

“He’s at peace, he no longer feels. He doesn’t need it”

I promised myself I would prepare him for the morgue with the respect and silent keening I’ve come to utilize during my nursing career.

“So many, when am I going to stop feeling so deeply? It makes me so scared that I’m going to die too”

Simultaneously, three ventilator alarms went off in the room and I went to address them and check that the other patients weren’t deteriorating. Suction, check outputs in the hope that organs weren’t failing, scan faces for signs of distress, ensure that the sedatives were working. Talk to grieving families inquiring about progress- it’s been so long since I’ve seen any.

I will remain ashamed the rest of my life over what happened next.

It took me three hours to make it over to prepare him because crisis after crisis arose on the unit. Multiple patients began to fail. He stayed there, in bed 6, ignored. In a normal time, his family would have been holding his hand telling him how much they loved him. There would be closure, love and tears He lay there, inanimate while the rest of the staff bustled around the living. No one touched him. He had died without ceremony or tribute.

They teach us in mass casualty training to color code the victims. Those wearing a black tag are the ones you bypass in order to save the ones that can be saved. It was perhaps the hardest concept for me to swallow in nursing.

"He deserves better than a black tag " I thought as I ran hanging meds and responded to plummeting vital signs.

At 7pm, after giving report- I began the arduous task of stripping off my protective gear for the first time that day. Gown, gloves, goggles, N-95 mask, scrub hat and plastic face shield. Urinating after 12 hours brings an involuntary sigh of relief. I shower in the locker room and will again when I get home to keep my family safe.

The routine was familiar. I thought it steadied me in a tumultuous time.

It was the card hanging in the locker room that leveled me.

It was from the deceased man’s family thanking the staff for their devoted care of him.

“I’m not a human being anymore. I practically stepped over a dead man who deserved more from me. I have lost all humanity. God, please forgive me.”

The blast of air hits me as I exit the hospital. The incongruity of the crocuses pushing through the snow make me smile through tears. Purple. All I have seen this past month is grey. The grey of the exhaust duct that supposedly filtering the poisonous viral particles away, the grey of the medical equipment we work with. The monochromatic lack of emotion that we arm ourselves with. The days are getting longer, and I see shafts of sunlight piercing from the clouds as if an entity from beyond is trying to signal me.

“It’s been so long since I daydreamed into the clouds.”

July 1976, New York City

“I’ll race you sewer to sewer!” I cry to my next-door neighbor Brian. He was also 9 like I was. However, he always beat me in running races and would never let me win. However, today I had new sneakers providing extra bounciness. I could feel that was going to be the tipping point. Today was the day that I’d beat him. A few of the other neighborhood kids lingered, curious.

“On your mark, get set, go!”

I ran, arms and legs pumping the 30 yards in the street, tapped the metal sewer plate with my toe and reversed course. The end stretch was where Brian always got me. I began pumping my arms extra hard and leaned like I had seen Bruce Jenner do in the Olympics.

“Tie!” Joey LaDolcetta screamed, “She tied with him!” I felt myself flush with pride.

I crouched, willing myself not to vomit. I didn’t want to the mar the moment I had worked and practiced for so hard.

Someone yelled “Car!” and we all ran to the sidewalk as the station wagon with the wooden trim rumbled down the street. The other kids wandered away, seeking a game of dodgeball or touch football.

Brian smiled at me, and we sat down on the curb together.

“It’s your new Pro Keds, I only have skips. If I had Pro Keds, I’d still beat you.”

“I have been practicing. I’m going to beat you someday.”

It was a hot day. I looked at both of our legs, the rivets of sweat creating lines through the dirt that gathered there from playing war and building trenches in our backyards. My Mom had tried to serve us toasted tuna sandwiches for lunch, and we had demanded k-rations like real soldiers.

“You’re fast. For a girl, I mean,” Brian replied.

“I’m going to the Olympics one day. “

“I know, you told me last night when we talked on our phone.”

Our “phone” consisted of a string with dixie cups on each end that we strung in between our upstairs window. Our houses were set close together, sharing an alleyway and one night Brian had decided to jump from his window to mine to visit. We lay in the upstairs hall giggling until our dads discovered what we had done and spanked us.

I stretched out on the curb. The arid summer air pushed the curtains in the yellow house across the street but brought no relief.

“Oh wow, look at the worms”

I looked where Brian was pointing. The shriveled earthworms lay scattered on the concrete sidewalk. They had migrated from the grass and had become trapped in the heat of the sidewalk. The fierce temperature had left them desiccated, stuck to the concrete.

I glanced upwards, hearing the roar of an oncoming plane descending towards LaGuardia airport.

“That cloud looks like a Pegasus”

“You’re right, the one next to it looks like a turtle.”

We began naming what the clouds looked like, laying down on the sidewalk, looking upward. He stretched his arm out to give me a cushion. I leaned into him, inhaling his musky boy smell, content. It was summer, I had finished reading “Little House on the Prairie” that morning and I was going to be the fastest runner on the block soon.

Mothers sat on the stoops in the dimming sunlight and the odd firefly flashed its light signaling evening’s ascent.

“What makes clouds, you think?”

“I think it’s everyone who died today in the world last breath. Everyone’s last breath gathers, and they all float up to heaven together, so no one gets scared. Even those worms come,” he pointed towards them with a flourish.

I stopped and stared. Had that many people died while I was playing boxball?

“We’re best friends, right?” he ventured.

“Yes”

“Let’s make a pact. We both die together so we get to be clouds and drift up to heaven together.”

“Deal, Tonto”

“No, no, no I’m the Lone Ranger. You’re Tonto.”

“Ok, Kemosabe”

We both laugh, remembering the show and then the lights came on in our houses, signaling dinner. I bolt suddenly, hungry for my mother’s meatloaf.

“Call me on the phone before bed”

I ran towards the house, warm and secure that I had a friend until the end.

He was lying, of course.

He moved away from the neighborhood 2 years later. I heard through the grapevine that he died from a drug overdose at frat party when he was 20.

I often wondered if he knew he was dying as he lay on the floor of the fraternity house.” Did he feel the poignancy of his choice as death approached? Did he feel the sadness of a life he’d never live? Did he remember that he promised to wait for me? Or did he just become nothing as the drugs swarmed his bloodstream?”

I gazed at many clouds since then searching for answers and trying to feel his presence.

A gust of air jerked me back into the present. I looked upward across the sky and out of force of habit began making out shapes of the billowy clouds. A turtle here. A person riding a bicycle on the next one. I felt the same flash of contentment I had 44 years ago. The fading sun drifted further westward, and the sky was streaked with vermillion and purple that illuminated the clouds. It was the first time since early March that color registered on me. It had all been a low humming grey until this moment.

As an adult, I know the scientific explanation of clouds. Water evaporation, cumulus etc. But the memory of being a fearless 9-year-old girl making a pact with her best friend makes me cling to the spiritual explanation versus the scientific. The Pawnee Indians thought clouds were clothing of the gods. I’m clinging to the notion that it’s everything bound from their earthly suffering slowly misting their way up to the great beyond.

“I’m still alive. I’m still trying. Tomorrow is a new day. Maybe my miracle will come.”

In my mind’s eye I see 9-year-olds running on a hot July evening and imagining spirits were cloud. It brings me peace and sense of normality that I haven’t felt in a few months.

“I can do this; I can retain my humanity.”

“Take care of them, will you Brian? I’ll see you again someday, but not today.”