GOOD news and bad news, examination and treatments, even death happened in full view of everyone; as you are admitted at the triage of LAC-USC Medical Center.
It was an extraordinary experience of a community.
As a story unfolded, I was there — when a young woman was brought in comatose, having taken a massive overdose of anti-depressant pills. Shortly after she arrived, her heart stopped. The triage staff worked to resuscitate her for some time, not because they had much hope of success, but because they knew it was important to those who survived to feel that everything possible had been done. They weren’t successful.
It fell on the physician, who led the Code Team, to tell her husband that his wife had died. The doctor sat there with him for a while and listened to his story. That’s what doctors are for.
The couple had come to California with the hope of making something better for themselves. Both their parents had a history of violence and alcoholism. He was a mechanic, while she waited tables in a bar. All they owned was a truck, which was more of an apology, and his tools. A week ago, the tools had been stolen and there was no money to replace them. Welcome to the human race!
They both had suffered from depression. She would wake in the night and wander in their hovel, so he would always hear her and awaken to sit with her in the dark. They were all each other had.
She had gone to the medical cabinet and taken down the whole bottle of a four-month supply of pills that had been given at the mental health clinic, a week before. She had swallowed it all. When she didn’t wander that night, he tried waking her up.
The man thanked the doctor for his efforts. It had been too many pills, too much pain, many years too late to bring her back. Once again, the doctor assured the man that “everything possible had been done.” The man sat quietly. Nodding, he said “Everything? Then she is healed and in heaven now.”
The doctor told me how deeply he was moved by the simplicity of the man’s life and depth of love for his wife. His heart went out to him in his loss. He had been a devoted husband, but she had been mortally wounded, long before she had been loved so completely.
And it was while I was lying down by the gurney in the emergency ward last Sunday, yielding to unbearable anxiety between blood tests and all the poking and prodding and humiliating assault to one’s body — while fluid drips down from a plastic bag into your arm — that I found myself thinking of that man and his wife.
I had sensed in him a sort of acceptance that was bewildering. He was young. Perhaps it never occurred to him that some pain might be beyond the power of love to heal…the thought was humbling. Is that what her husband had known? Is that what he had accepted? If so, how had he found the courage to love her so completely? And having loved her in this way, how could he go on?
In the anguishing aftermath of a spouse’s suicide, surrounded by many well-intentioned and impotent words of comfort, the man must have understood the power of acceptance as the only way for those who survive to find peace and heal.
In time, he will be able to go on, because he knew that he could not have loved her more. No one could have. But, she had been mortally wounded a long time ago… long before he even knew her name. Now, he would have understood.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
