A short story inspired by recent events...
After we say our last goodbyes, her eyes close and our hands stay clasped. I rest my head on her chest, our gazes now detached from each other. A few tears fall onto her gown, forming a darkly spreading stain across the pale white, starched cotton. My ear rests against her ribs. A slight pulse of her skin pushes against my cheek, her heart still insistent on creating a rhythm as counterpoint to her slowing breath. They had turned off the artificial noises that echoed her vital processes, withdrawn the bodily intrusions, promising an end without alarms, without summons, affording her some quiet dignity at last.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Aural pairings of her heart’s shuttering chambers. A persistent, consistent pumping that channels oxygenated blood through her organs and tissues. Her essential fluids pulse through valves and slender pipes, recycling and replenishing in a sustaining cycle. Pulsating to an intrinsic beat, her heart’s innate life force had defined her body’s lifetime from spontaneous beginnings to struggling finality, from her alpha to her omega.
This is the beginning of the end – the artificial is being eclipsed by the natural. What would her heart say as I listen to its own death throes? What will it tell me, in these final, flickering beats?
I continue to listen, seeking awareness in her hypnotic rhythm, sinking into the deepest levels of almost subliminal perception. Transcending our one-sided communion to a series of parallel imaginings. From these a darker thought intrudes, creeping up on me. I accept it passively, regarding it without challenge, turning it over in my mind:
What if her heart stops because somehow I will it? Could I whisper a single, powerful Word to silence her pulse, painlessly transmuting her body into a quiescent state? Cessation, infarction; her circulation stagnating in arteries and veins; the mottled blue countenance of death appearing on her face, her neck. The pallor subsiding down her arms, blue veins increasingly contrasting with pallid skin. Lungs useless, bellows vainly bringing oxygen to a dying fire.
The Word then comes to me unbidden. An omnipotent Word. A Word to whisper as a dying comfort, but surely only in extremis, an injection of ending into an animal’s suffering? But might it also bring peaceful closure, a welcome departure from physical pain and suffering that the bearer is all too willing to relinquish?
Yes, it is the final Word, heard only by those seeking a welcome release. A terrible Word, a scythe to cut through the living, its whisper a death sentence. I should not speak it. It’s knowledge of me is mistaken. My knowing of it is a travesty of death’s parting processes. I am not ready.
But still I say it. It compels me. My lips moving close to her breast. Softly. Unaware.
Like glancing at a watch’s ticking second-hand, there is an expectant pause, a tipping point to another slice of time. I wait for a following beat. But there is only deathly silence. Her heart has stopped – instantly, without fanfare or aural decay. My brain echoes the expected beat, then flails in the dark, my anticipation dying with her. No more pulsations on my cheek, just the last rise of her chest before a final exhalation empties the spirit from her body.
I feel no pain, nor terror. My eyes open. Am I imagining it? I raise my head from her chest and look at her for a last time. No, her now relaxed mien matches her soundless passing. Death has not yet replaced disinfectant in my nostrils. To what depths have I sunk to unearth this Word? Is the power to know and speak this Word a blessing or a curse?
Without looking back, I leave her in that white-lit room and wander as a ghost traversing the hospital’s corridors, my face still blank, no visible emotions. I pass the nurses who had cared for her. They are too busy to notice me. I leave them in both my own and her wake.
Realisation blooms in my mind of the Word’s powerful potential, but my narrow comprehension remains. Is it a Word any heart can hear? That every heart has to obey? Perhaps it is a gift? Yes, that is the most likely explanation, the most obvious truth to convey. Thoughts of a wider demonstration of my Word rise unbidden and claim, even chain, my thoughts. It is only befitting that the Word — no, my Word — becomes a gift to many more.
I follow my awoken guide to the ICU. A place that holds the sickest, most isolated patients in the hospital. With the reassurance that their desire to live is the weakest, their need for finality the strongest, I am greeted by a cacophony of pumps, alarms and gases as I enter this medical parlour. This is indeed no place for a dying person.
“I see you,” I whisper, looking round at all the pricked and piped immobile bodies, hovering on the edge of life. “I see all of you.”
“Now you must hear me.”