A Simple Phrase

Aug 10 2011

The signal-to-noise ratio

is high

in the ICU.

Every beep

the hiss of machines

the rhythm of beating hearts

means something.

Visitors

whispering into the ears

of loved ones,

who may, or may not

have heard.

There is no private hope

or sorrow,

except a curtain drawn

monitors, turned off.

Inhuman wailing

that could wake the dead,

but didn’t.

The sound of skin-on-skin,

hands gripped

nails, digging-in.

Alarms go off

repeatedly.

So no tragedy passes unwitnessed,

and denial

gets more and more difficult.

You’d have thought there’d be soothing jazz

waterfalls, and whale calls

piped-in

for the sake of the sick.

The white noise

of convalescence.

But this is high-tech medicine,

and we do everything

we can.

Like a Vegas casino

the light is constant, dim,

so keeping track of time

is guess-work.

And like blackjack, shooting craps

the odds are stacked

against us.

The house

always wins.

Important things are happening

in the world outside.

But sound

does not penetrate

this airless space,

windowless, fluorescent.

Where big events

in little lives

take place

  —  dying

           and death

                and survival.

But she didn’t die.

Or at least not as I had imagined;

holding hands

with family, and friends,

last words

a final shallow breath.

Just a white-coated man

stepping back

and flatly pronouncing the sentence  —

“Stop CPR”.

Not dying

as if it meant something,

as if she left as she had lived.

Just the arrest

called,

coming to a stop

when enough was enough.

And a nurse

whipping the curtain shut

with a sheer metallic “shrrrrrp”.

This doesn’t come out of personal experience; despite my medical background. It actually comes from an article I read:  A Tale of Two Daughters by Aleksandar Hemon, published in The New Yorker, the June 13/20 2011 edition.

It was brilliantly written, and deeply affecting. So while that detached analytical part of my brain was stepping back and being exhilarated by the fine writing, the other part was utterly immersed in a harrowing and moving read.

There was this sense of resigned deflation in the actually moment of his daughter’s death; which seemed technical and anticlimactic, and unworthy of her short life. There was no chorus of angels, no change in the light, no momentous sense of meaning and passage. She didn’t “die” in the dramatic way we imagine it; things just came to an inevitable stop. 

The poem is built around sound. So it starts with life-sustaining machines; and ends with the sound of the final curtain drawn shut.