Every living thing dies. There’s no stopping it.
In my experience—and I’ve had more than my share—endings rarely go well. There is absolutely nothing life affirming about death. You’d think that, given the prevalence and irrevocability of death, whoever or whatever put the whole thing together would’ve given a little more attention to the process of exit. Maybe next time.
When I was still alive, a critical part of my job was to facilitate the endings. As a veterinarian, I was a member of the one healing profession that not only was authorized to kill, but in fact was expected to do so. I saved life, and then I took it away.
Whether it was because I was a woman—and, therefore, a life bearer by definition—or simply because my neurons fired that way, the dissonance created by my roles as reaper and healer had been with me since my first day of vet school.
Although I tried to convince myself that I always did the best I could for all in my care, I often worried that every creature I’d killed would be waiting for me at the end. I imagined a thousand beautiful, innocent little eyes glaring at me, judging, accusing, and detailing my failures. I didn’t do enough for them, those eyes would say; I wasn’t good enough. Or perhaps I gave up too soon. Or maybe, for some, I kept them alive too long when they were in pain—a mere shadow of their former selves—only because that is what someone else wanted for them.
Of these offenses I’m almost certainly guilty. In the end, the responsibility of filling heaven is too difficult a burden for mere mortals like me. Yes, I had cared, but caring is not enough.
As I became more ill, after the cancer traveled from my breasts to my lymph nodes, my worry turned into fear and, at the last, terror. My hands had been the instrument of too many deaths born out of the burden I had asked for but was ill prepared to shoulder. One of these deaths in particular began to gnaw at me until it filled me with such shame that my defenses of denial and rationalization abandoned me altogether.
I came to believe that I could not face these failures without an offering of true and demonstrable repentance. For me this meant not just empty words of apology, but finding meaning in and justification for the decisions I’d made or, alternatively, finally admitting to myself that I wasn’t who I believed and that I probably had not mattered at all—not to my husband, my colleagues, my own animals, or those I tended to in life.
In the midst of that search, just as I was beginning to weave some of the discrete threads into a broader tapestry of consequence, I ran out of time. The pain became unimaginable and the morphine drip remained my last best friend until everything just stopped.
And so here I am, unable to retreat and afraid to move onward empty-handed. Instead, I watch and hope that what I see will bring me understanding or at least the courage to move on without it, before everything fades and my pages turn blank. I don’t know how much time I have before this happens or the consequence for me if it does, but I don’t think it’s good.
If you believe my present predicament is merely the product of overreaction or perhaps cowardice, you may be right. But then I only have one question for you.
How many lives have you taken?