ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Today at work I came across a chart for a four year old boy who died several years ago at the hospital here in Lawrence. When someone dies at the hospital, the attending nurse draws horizontal two red lines through the chart and writes the time of death in the space for discharge from admissions. Usually if I find a chart for a patient who has passed away, it’s a person in their late fifties or older, with reams of paperwork regarding their failing liver, or chronic respiratory distress, or their bad heart. I flipped through the rest of the chart to see how old it was and if any of it needed to be added to the stack for long-term storage via microfiche and when I spotted the doctor’s report that began, “This four year old white male” and launched into an explanation of their unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, the hairs stood up on my arms and neck.

Children dying freaks me out. I mean, it’s not that I think it’s worse than other people dying, but it’s like when you’re a kid you worry about dying and grown-ups tell you kids don’t die or something like that. But it’s not true and you know it. According to the physician’s report he’d been sick for a couple days already when his mother found him barely breathing and rushed him to the ER, where he went into cardiac arrest and died within minutes of admission. I can’t help filling in the blanks, even if they’re the wrong blanks. All night I thought about how just days, hours even, before his death none of the people who loved him had any inkling that their little kid would be gone so soon. Would it have even made a difference if they had known? I don’t imagine that it could have. In stories about people who try to cheat their fate, nothing ever comes of it. They avoid taking the train that wrecks, but they do get mugged in the street afterward and die anyway. Or they save one life and inadvertently cause a dozen children to die in a crash when the life they saved drives into a school bus. Maybe that little boy would have grown up to be another Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy, and it’s a good thing for a half dozen people that no one cheated fate on his behalf. Anyway, everybody knows from TV and movies and Stephen King that you can’t cheat death out of your time, not really. So why does it bother me so much that a child died when I have all this proof of inevitability? I can’t imagine how it would feel for your child to simply die unexpectedly from an illness at age four, or rather, I can and I wish I couldn’t. It seems so nineteenth century and wrong. Either way, maybe it’s not true that you can’t cheat death. I don’t know, really.

I think working with this stuff is making me morbid.