The night your heart stopped beating I had the curious sense that you were standing with me at your own bedside. If you were, you probably noted the flash of shock across my face when I looked down at you and said aloud, "He's not breathing."
You were supposed to go home tomorrow. Your wife, you once told me, kept peacocks.
"Breathe!" Did you hear my panicked hiccup, the way that inhaled word nearly choked me? Was that the moment you realized the truth yourself? Up until then, you may have been floating somewhere around the top of the IV pole, thinking, Who is that man in my bed? Why doesn't he move? So still, so yellowed and waxy.
I wonder if, realizing the truth, you felt the same horrified thrill I did, and when I shouted, "Get a crash cart in here!" you thought, as my father used to say, Yes, and make it snappy! Perhaps you hovered just over my left shoulder, watching while I fitted the soft, plastic-smelling mask over your mouth and nose and emptied my lungs into yours. How odd, you may have thought, in your detached, spirit way. How strange and fruitless, this struggle to force us back into a body, as if life were only a matter of oxygen in the lungs and a pulse in the veins. But then, this is something the dead must understand better than the living, and I suspect you were becoming more used to your new existence by the moment. Those were airless moments for both of us. You, not alive; me, disembodied with adrenaline. Each of us not all there. Neither of us somewhere else yet.
When the rest of the team arrived, did my sense of relief offend you? It wasn't personal, my reluctance to be alone with you. Don't think I was unfeeling, the way I called out to the nursing students, huddled wide-eyed and uncertain in the doorway, "One of you come and take over!" And to the nurse compressing your chest, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five, "Let one of the students do that; they might as well have the experience." Were you outraged at the cavalier way I delegated such sacred events, or did you admire my coolness and presence of mind?
Maybe, hanging there, just under the ceiling light, you approved of my decision, and thought, Yes, let the students practice. What do I have to lose?
This is an old joke with nurses: What's the worst a student can do in a code, kill the patient? People have to learn somehow.
Did you watch all of it? The cracked ribs; the charging and the clearing; the shocks and the brief, false hopes? Eventually, the questioning glances, shot sidelong, the dispirited instructions to give it one more try?
How long did you stay around after it was over, and the detritus of battle cleared away? Long enough to watch us cover your face with a clean sheet? I hope you didn't mind the students whispering, embellishing the parts they played. Who can blame them for assigning heroism? We draw meaning from tragedy in the ways we know how. Later, did you perhaps trail along after me, closing the wake of my path through those who still slouched in the hallway in the name of being helpful. There are always too many people at a code. Did you waft your way before me into the nurses' station and settle on a corner of the desk while I keyed in the moments after your last moments? When I called your wife, did you reflexively reach for the phone in my hand? Did you shake your head at the futility of a stranger offering comfort down a cold, fiber-optic line? Did you regret that, at the end, I was the one who said goodbye to her, instead of you? "I guess I'd better go feed the peacocks" was the last thing she told me. I thought you might want to know.
You may have escorted me as far as the time clock, then courteously held the elevator door for me on my way down: your way of saying, Thanks for trying, anyway. If that's how it was, if you stayed that long with me, you would know how white and drawn my face appeared, reflected in the glass exit doors, how hot the living tears were on my cheeks. But you'll remember that the parking lot was windy that morning. The tears dried quickly, so it's possible you didn't see them after all.