Death in Blue

The keening in the ER waiting room came from a hunched over man in a leather seat. He was wearing a black sweatshirt with a hood over his head, and black oversized sunglasses.  He rocked his small frame back and forth over his lap, hugging himself, unable to control the spasms of lament that alternately groaned and sobbed.  I had just been removed to this room from a hallway seat inside the ER by an attendant shuttling friends and family outside the inner sanctum because a "trauma" was coming in. I had been waiting with a friend who was experiencing chest tightness and back pain and as he lay on a gurney near the ambulance entrance, I hobbled out to the waiting room on crutches. 

I was feeling much better on that night as I watched this poor man hunched over a pain I recognized as the uncontrollable loss of love and thought perhaps this was associated with the incoming "trauma" I had been shuttled away from.  It is rare to see a man roar with sadness, to lose control of his body, his hands and his heart as he was.  His clothing denied a fondness for convention and something made me wonder if he was related to a loved one, the trauma victim.  At some point, an 8 year old school girl, latina by her looks and dressed in a pleated skirt and white polo shirt, brought him a handful of tissues, for which he thanked her in an effeminate voice.  He was, however, unconsolable.

I made my way into the bathroom and when I returned, the lacrimose man was now seated with another man who was just listening to him cry, letting him hold onto his wrist as if by offering this lanyard to the man's sail of sadness he could keep him from floating away.  They were trying to call someone on a phone, but didn't know the numbers. The distraught man did not know what to do and his companion tried to make a joke at some point and was called a "bitch" lovingly by the man he was trying to comfort.  This fond nomenclature, their odd manner and dress, the location near West Hollywood all gelled into a portrait of two gay men who had lost a compadre on a late Thursday night.  The calm one didn't say much, just let his friend sob and by his mere presence provided a cleat upon which the man could wind the tormented rope of tears. At one point they were going to leave, but somehow, thought better and sat down again.

I was allowed back into the ER hallway and joined my friend as we rolled down a long hallway to get him a Catscan of his heart.  He reported that the trauma victim had been a "huge black man" with blood pouring out of his chest. An EMT had called out to the charge nurse that a bullet had hit the man's right ventricle and my friend watched as they started performing surgery on the vitcim even as they pushed his gurney into an available room.  By the time I had been allowed to re-enter, the curtains were drawn and all one could see was a bustling of clogged and sneakered feet.  A flash of blood red sheet under a long brown arm on the table illustrated a moment of life in time. A snapshot of an end. Or a new beginning.

At some point during my friend's catscan I heard a screaming roar from down the hallway. As if a megaphone had been offered the waiting room mourner, the sound was louder than I had heard when only feet away from him.  The screeching sadness did not let up for a couple of minutes and then was over.  The hall was quiet again and my friend exited the X-ray room was a look of recognition on his face.

We later learned that the victim had died and knew that the friend had taken the news at high pitch.  A gurney with a dark blue plastic rectangular cover was wheeled into the victim's room, an answer to my unspoken question: how were they going to remove the body without calling attention?  My friend and I settled down to wait for the attending to decide what his next step would be to address the chest pain. We weren't worried but realized that hospitals take any sign of heart attack seriously and would not release him until tests proved him safe for travel. His own heart was pumping well, if under a bit of high pressure, as we watched the man with the shattered ventricle get wheeled out under his blue butter dish dome.  

Death rolled down the hallway, dodging nurses, doctors, administrators, patients, friends, family, environmental attendants and aides.  He rose taller than many heads he passed and his silent wheels drew little attention.  Surely the hospital staff recognized the passing emblem, but did no one else suspect that the passing body had indeed "passed."? Of all who noted the gurney only one janitor registered a reaction as she rolled in her mop and bucket. Her face looked a bit anguished as she entered the room to do her task and behind the curtain I could see nurses gathering up the bloody sheets and pick up blue paper, gauze and instrument packaging from the floor while she took a deep breath before mopping.

The last moments of this  man's presence involved many people from the man who clearly loved and mourned him to the EMT's who tried to save his life, to the small Latina woman who would clean up after his leaky life. The hall was somber for the few moments his cadaverous carriage made its way to cold storage and then it returned to the living, the breathing and those of us who straddled health with various degrees of success. My friend's heart turned out to be sound, my hip healed and the man in mourning has taken his grief with him into his own dark night.  They say we are all dying, but I say death is not for the living. It is for those who pass without rippling the sea around us, for whom no one mourns, or notes with a grimace our blood upon the floor.