carriecuthbert.art
Sometimes I wonder why I’m not more fucked up.
Eighteen years in emergency medicine.
Hundreds of places where someone had just died.
Kitchens.
Living rooms.
Parking lots.
Stairwells.
The side of a highway.
Bedrooms that still smelled
like the person who slept there
for forty years.
The movies lie about this part.
They make death seem like a conversation.
Last words.
Final breaths.
A goodbye that changes everything.
The truth is —
the dying are already gone
before that moment arrives.
What speaks instead
is everything else.
I was a student the first time I understood this.
We were called to a cardiac arrest.
A rundown apartment.
A young man.
Already gone for several days
before anyone noticed.
Fast food containers.
A bed.
Nothing else.
Neighbors came.
Then police.
No family.
No one to call.
I stood in that place
and felt it immediately.
Something settled in me then.
Every life should be mourned by someone.
His wasn’t.
And I have never forgotten
the particular silence of that.
Years later I was called to a couple
approaching one hundred years old.
Middle of the night.
She had woken to find him
on the ground.
He had no goals of care document.
So we worked the code.
Then I had to go and tell her.
She looked at me
before I said a word.
I know.
I saw him standing above his body.
We sat down.
Made tea.
Waited for the coroner.
There was a calmness to her
that unsettled me.
Not absence of love.
Something else.
A woman who had lived long enough
to know grief well.
Not smaller.
Just known.
For years I stood in places
where love had just lost someone.
Their faces.
The silence between words.
The moment a person realizes
they have to go on without them.
I felt all of it.
Every time.
It wasn’t my grief exactly.
It was theirs.
And I had nowhere to put it down.
I thought all those years of witnessing
would prepare me.
That I had felt enough of it
that when mine came
it might be somehow smaller.
Then my dad died.
For years I could medicalize it.
I didn’t know their stories.
I didn’t love them.
The grief stayed at the surface.
Where the uniform held it.
When my dad died
there was no surface.
As a medic death is something that happens.
As a daughter
it cuts right through you.
Looking back,
I think I know why I carried so much of it.
Dyslexia.
Diagnosed late.
Carried longer.
While other children decoded text
I learned to decode everything else.
Pictures.
Context.
Tone.
The thing underneath the thing
someone was trying to say.
I learned to find meaning
in what wasn’t written.
From what was only felt.
Every place I walked into
I felt what was in the air.
The grief before it had a name.
The love in who came.
The loss in who didn’t.
I could not turn it off.
I still can’t.
I carried them all home.
The ones with full rooms.
The ones someone was already missing
before I walked through the door.
And the ones whose absence
seemed to belong to no one.
I felt every one of them.
Because every life should be mourned by someone.
Because every life should leave an absence somewhere.
The lonely ones always carried more weight for me.
They still are.