And Those You Love, Losing You

“What got you into the hospital?” I ask, already knowing what I know.

“Cigarettes,” she tells me, she surprising me, she not a breath to lose, her not losing a breath.

She’s in the ICU, hardly the first time, she only 52, at least one daughter, O2 Sat something like 58 when admitted, pulmonologist tells me maybe a year, me asking her what to do if her heart stops, she stops breathing, she telling me, “Let me talk to my daughter.”

“My own daughter should be here, “ I say, my heart, my heart in my words.

I see it all too often.

Smokers who smoked, thinking not them.

Only to have them meet me in the ICU, they all too literally sucking wind, and me asking them what to do if they die.

“You’ve passed away,” I explain. “We’re only trying to bring you back. Most times we can’t.”

“It’s not like TV,” I say. “CPR, some kind of massage. That shock to the heart, no big deal.”

“You’re dead,” I tell them.

“You’re dead.”

And we, for our part, wishboning death, desperate enough then to break your ribs, to electrocute you, to put a tube down your throat, to do whatever it takes to try to bring you back.

To do just that, to try—only to try—when, truth is, bringing you back hardly ever happens.

As for that tube down your throat, that ventilator breathing for you?

Just a machine, only a machine. It breathing for you, until you, if you can, can again breathe for yourself.

And if you can’t, if life is no longer life?

Someone, someone you so love, making the decision to stop that vent, to, figuratively, pull the plug, to let you go where you might already have gone, have gone more gently into that, that good night.

That someone living with that decision forever.

“What got you into the hospital?” I’d asked her that morning, and she telling me, “Cigarettes.”

To die for that.

To someday go to some ICU, like her, on BiPAP, glad only not to be intubated, not this time anyway. But to know that the next time, you then 52, maybe 53, might be the last time.

To lose what?

Everything. Everyone you love.

And those you love, losing you.