On Death and Dying
I was late to get my period. Years later than all the rest of my peers. Late enough that it was decided I should see someone about it. A slew of tests and exams yielded nothing—nothing good and nothing bad. The doctor I was seeing recommended one final test to rule out his list of potential bad things that might be going on. He thought it was unlikely, but possible, that a tumor on my pituitary gland was the culprit of my missing period.
Just months prior my beloved grandmother had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor and had died shortly thereafter. It was hard for me not to equate tumor with death sentence. At home that evening, sitting with my dad on the couch, I asked, “What happens if they find a tumor when they do the MRI?” He responded, “We’ll do everything we possibly can to take care of you.” “And what if it’s incurable?” I asked. “We’ll hold you and love you while you die,” he replied.
I’ve grown up in the southern culture where people candy coat bad news and criticism to the point that you are never quite sure if they love you or hate you. In a sea of sugar, my dad’s reply stood out in sharp relief.
My MRI turned out to be just fine, and my late period showed up on its own accord a few years later—an imaginary brush with death. I spend my days working with, and for, healthy young people. I lead high school aged students on extended backpacking trips, and my colleagues are the sort that find pleasure in running ultra marathons and ascending sharp peaks. As such, I’ve had very little experience with the only certain eventuality we all face.
Last summer, however, on the bus ride back to town from a month spent leading a backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, we came across a devastating wreck on the side of the highway. My co-instructors and I were all trained in wilderness first aid, and we stopped, leaving our twelve students on the bus, to see if we could be useful.
There were multiple victims, from a single car crash. Most had been unbelted and were flung forcefully from the car, which was overturned, in the sagebrush. The man I helped was conscious but unable to say more than “My chest, my chest, help!” You take extensive first aid training when you work in the wilderness because help is often delayed. I had done scenarios with fake blood and fake patients many times before. Walking towards the scene from the bus it felt like I was walking into a scenario, but once I had the man’s head in my hands holding his spine stable, nothing about it bore any resemble to a scenario.
I knew the man needed advanced medical care and quickly. That care was on its way by virtue of the first responders--a family who witnessed the crash and provided initial and ongoing first aid. While we waited for the paramedics, my goal was to keep his spine stable and keep his airway open, and if he stopped breathing or his heart stopped beating, to start CPR. These tools and this knowledge felt woefully inadequate however. I think they felt woefully inadequate because they were. Because sometimes no amount of care, advanced or otherwise can save someone. I didn’t know that the man whose head I was holding was going to die in the Emergency Room later that day, but I did know that beyond protecting his spine and his airway, I could shade his face from the sun, and I could talk to him and tell him what was happening with compassion and calm.
When he was airlifted away, and the other victims had left in their respective helicopters and ambulances, and my co-instructors and I returned to our bus full of sobered teens, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. From a joyous morning waking up in our tents, feeling the glow of accomplishment of completing a thirty day course in the wilderness to kneeling beside a man who was dying on the side of the road, was perhaps the widest arc of emotions in the shortest time span I’ve ever experienced.
When my supervisor wrote to ask me about how I was doing with regards to the wreck, I said to her in part: “I know even the most trained medical professionals are not magicians, but that reality doesn’t change how sad it is for a person to die young in a sudden accident. I’m glad we stopped. I’m very sad for the family. I’m grateful our students saw what they saw from a distance and hope it will encourage them (and us) to not gloss over the risks we flirt with everyday in the front-country.”
That sadness and hope remain a year out from the accident. The addendum I would add now is a question—How, do you remain sensitized to the fragility of life, and allow that knowledge to cultivate gratitude for each moment you are not in catastrophe?
