Going Away

Going Away Kathleen Lee I was working as the weekend night clerk in the LDS Hospital emergency room in Salt Lake City and one Sunday I'd come on at three because I was puUing a double shift, fining in for someone who was iU. In the early evening, paramedics wheeled in an old woman lying with her stomach mounded, hard and stiU as an inverted plastic bowl, beneath a sheet. They whipped her into a room and a crowd of doctors, nurses and techs whirled about with the kind of concentrated freneticism emergency rooms are renowned for; that exhilarating, terrifying adrenaline created when skill grapples with the unknown. They pounded on her chest, inserted tubes, stuck a mask over her mouth. She remained inert.The paramedic who came to give me the details of her life—name, birthdate, address, health insurance —said, "Big old heart attack down at Dee's." A family restaurant at the bottom of the hiU from the hospital. "Plate of roast chicken and mashed potatoes and a slice of key lime pie waiting for her." He sighed. "Stella, it's such a treat to find you here while it's still light out." The paramedics flirted Uke they washed their hands after every patient. One ofthem had once handed me a bucket containing a severed foot wrapped in bloody rags while he asked me to a barbecue the foUowing afternoon. They called me SteUa because they liked how the quiet haUway echoed in the middle ofthe night when they yeUed, "SteUa, SteUa! We got one for ya!" "Any family coming?" I asked about the heart attack. "Nope. She was alone." Alone and now dead. It was Mother's Day. She was in her eighties and had the pale powdery skin and puffy soft quality that babies also possess. But she was gray and slack, uninhabited, a house hastily abandoned. I could tell this from across the sUck Unoleum hall. Her eyes were closed, her short white hair was mangled and twisted, she wore no jewelry. I knew everyone 69 70Fourth Genre was doing their job, but I wanted them to stop. She had already had a bad enough day. Eating alone in a restaurant on Mother's Day. Such a pubUc display ofloneliness frightened and impressed me. Having a massive heart attack in plain view of happy famflies, or at least, famflies trying to be happy, struck me as grand, harsh, real, and immeasurably sad; it thrflled me in a way I didn't understand and couldn't examine because it felt unacceptable. Such a death had the brazen elegance ofa calculated gesture, and I was glad that she refused to be revived. The cloud of doctors and nurses hovering over the body finaUy ceased agitating, gathered up the debris from their efforts and left, snapping the curtain closed so no passerby would be disturbed by sight of a cooling corpse. I was unsettled and took myself off to the bathroom to pump my own chest, puUing air in and out ofmy lungs, feeling the pulse ofmy heart, something I rarely noticed. I wiped my eyes, imagining that I was fuU of sorrow for a person I didn't know. And I did feel sorrow, but beneath the sadness, murky, complicated emotions rested like sludge. The rest ofthe night was typicaUy eventful: soppy, raving drunks suffering from gastritis, someone who feU asleep at the wheel and roUed their car, a gun shot wound or knifing, asthma attacks, ceUuUtis, overdoses: accidents and failures ofthe body.Also, failures ofwfll and spirit.An emergency room is a place where disaster and failure, loss and breakdown power the fluorescent lights, the beep of IV machines, the glitter of heart monitors. I was in my own emergency room of faüure—a recendy derailed relationship, a coUapse of interest and ambition; I didn't know what to do with myself, my supposed talents, skiUs, and potential—and I felt uneasily reassured by the larger, more catastrophic and concrete misfortunes of the people I encountered at work. I walked away from the ER each bleary sunrise, stunned to discover the world fuU ofpeople who seemed bUthe about their own inevitable decUnes...