Goodbye Again

Yesterday, I posted the story of the family in Monrovia, Indiana, that was forced to consider pulling the plug on their youngest daughter after a serious car accident that left her unable to recover.  Last night, her father announced on Facebook that his daughter was "with God now".  Her organs were donated to who knows how many lucky recipients who were praying for a miracle.  Parts of Meredith live on.

I was, unluckily, present in an ICU hospital room for just this sort of thing when I was sent there for an aneurysm brain bleed.  I was in a double room.  Another woman was on the other side of the curtain, on a ventilator.  The male nurse asked me if I wanted to watch TV.  I said I would but didn't want to disturb the other patient.  He said, "I wish you could disturb her.  She had what you have, but she's not doing so well."  That was his tactful way of saying that the woman was brain dead.  She was being kept alive for organ donation...something I figured out for myself when I overheard one of her children weeping over her, "You've always had such pretty eyes, and now someone else is going to see through them."  I realized in that moment that I should not be there.  These were private moments within a family.  I had no business intruding on their privacy, even though a curtain separated us, and it wasn't my fault.  And then, late one night, the transplant team came to usurp the room, doing whatever they do to prepare for organ harvest.  Meanwhile, the hospital was desperately trying to find a private room to get me out of there. My surgery was over.  I was no longer critical.  Fortunately, it happened the very next morning.

I am a little surprised at how very sad I feel for Meredith's family today.  Yeah, yeah, yeah....people die every day.  Grandparents and mothers and fathers get old and die.  People in the drug culture die every day.  Soldiers get killed.  People get drunk and do stupid stuff and die.  People get cancer for seemingly no reason at all, or drop dead of heart attacks.  (Like my very own stepson and brother, respectively.)  But...but...it doesn't happen to US.  Those nasty things happen to others.  But a child? A beautiful, intelligent, talented, athletic kid with her whole life ahead of her?  I internalized this one. I know the family.  I had her sister in class.  I get it.  All I can really tell you is that if something like this happened to my daughter, her husband, or my grandchildren, you will be able to visit me at the psychiatric ward in a hospital somewhere.  I would not survive intact.  There would be no further reason for me to live.

The older I get, the more these things affect me.  I try to offer support by way of my own experiences with grief but am not always sure if it hits the mark.  I don't get into the "so sorry for your loss" stuff...or worse..."she/he's in a better place".  Yet, I wonder why we are so shocked when these things happen.  Wake up!  You are not promised tomorrow...and neither am I!!

Having spent most of my adult career as an English teacher, I sometimes turn to literature for answers, and today my mind goes to this from John Donne's "Meditation 17":

No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less As well as if a promontory were, As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. These famous words by John Donne were not originally written as a poem - the passage is taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and is prose.