Whispers of Strangers

The evening was shaping up to be a typical work night consisting of hospital admission reports for me to transcribe, flowing in as audio files and flowing out as perfectly formatted medical reports. Their subjects consisted of crumpled people, many far past their humane expiration date; most hospitalized with pneumonia, cancer, or kidney failure; some clinging to life on respirators, others facing the great unknown with courage and dignity. Yes, the night was nothing extraordinary, simply a typical night.

Working from home definitely had its advantages. A load of laundry was only seconds away, and I enjoyed a break from the monotony of sitting at my desk in the corner of my bedroom, my only company the doctors’ droning voices thousands of miles away coming into my bedroom through the invisible web. I had never met the doctors personally or even held a conversation with any of them, but I knew each one's habits intimately: There was Fast Frank, Slurring Stan, and my favorite, Paper-Shuffling Paul.

Too often the doctors would multitask, sometimes eating while dictating. The repugnant sounds of gnawing and sloshing disturbed me. I pictured chunks of turkey, cheese, and mayo taking flight, somehow hurling thousands of miles toward me. Something never sat quite right in my gut at the thought of Dr. So-and-So dictating grandma’s death summary over a turkey club, explaining her demise as the result of aspirated vomitus during extubation. Yet I understood the reality of it, an overworked surgeon sneaking in dinner despite grandma’s deadly vomitus.

As I uploaded the report I had just finished transcribing, I stood to stretch while the next dictation downloaded. I staggered to the window next to my desk, my left knee stiff from continuously pressing my foot pedal, and I slid the window open. A frosty, after-rain breeze, saturated with the fragrance of sagebrush, caressed my face. The surrounding city lights shimmered like a mirror reflecting a star-laden night sky, as if the storm clouds above couldn’t stifle the starlight. I took one more cleansing breath and sat back down at my desk to find my next report was not just an average admission report, but a kidney transplant preoperative report.

Good news: Someone was receiving a kidney transplant. Bad news: Someone died to donate that kidney. Oh, the inherent balance of hope and loss—a balance of which I was all too acquainted.

As I began, the report flowed much as other transplant reports, but partway through, the dancing of my fingers across the keyboard stopped, silenced by the doctor’s words. Had I heard him correctly? Had he just uttered those words?

“The donor is a 15-year-old boy brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

My blood stilled. I rewound the dictation and listened again. The doctor rarely spoke of the donor, not daring to tread on the stained soil of the tragic trail leading to this glorious second chance for life. Yet, his words reverberated in my ears:

A 15-year-old boy brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I removed my earbuds. I pushed my chair back from my desk. I sat, taking a moment of silence for this boy, this broken boy, and for his mother, his heartbroken mother. Her universe had violently shifted and shattered. All she accepted as truth now terrified and infuriated her, for the unthinkable had happened.

I see her reach out for anything to stop her descent into the deep nothingness gaping below her as she sits next to his bed in the ICU, the stench of antiseptic and urine mingling in her nostrils. She cannot bear to touch him, for this flesh in front of her no longer houses her son but is simply the earthy remnant of something more, someone remarkable.

A blue hue discolors his lips. She listens to the hum of the ventilator, his precious chest rising and falling to its beat. His feet stick out from the sterile, white sheet, and she notices his toenails need trimmed. His long hair drapes over his eyes, but she cannot bear to whisk it back. His long hair had baffled the medics, deceiving them to believe he was a girl, but alas, he is a boy – her boy.

The day wears on, and nurses, doctors, and caseworkers glide in and out, some talking to her or holding her hand and others just moving around her son, adjusting a tube or injecting a medication.

She looks out the window. She rages.

She despises the woman clinging to her newborn wrapped in a powder blue blanket. She abhors the teenage boy wearing a red baseball cap sporting a fresh cast. She loathes the young woman in canary yellow scrubs scurrying to her car. She detests them all, for how can the world possibly continue, oblivious to the enormous rent now fissuring its surface?

However, despite her anguish, in the midst of her confusion and disbelief, this woman makes a decision: the decision to donate her son’s organs.

I wept.

I wept for this faceless, nameless woman. I wept for her agony, her utter loss. I wept for the graduation she would never attend, the daughter-in-law she would never know, the grandchildren she would never embrace. I wept for the guilt and emptiness that lay ahead in her path. Sitting alone in the corner of my bedroom, I felt this woman’s heart like few others could, for I myself had sat next to my own son in the ICU, my boy with the long hair. I heard those same words echoing in my mind: “I know there is never an appropriate time for this question, but have you considered donating your son’s organs?”

This woman, who neither knew of my existence nor of my tears now freely flowing for her – this woman and I shared an unearthly connection. Our sons had both left this world on their own terms, by their own hands, in their fear and fierceness. We both had wrestled this horror and both came to the same conclusion: I must find meaning in this senselessness. I must grasp this opportunity for my son’s tragedy to uplift the tiniest corner of the world, even while my tiny corner splinters.

After some time, sitting at my desk in the corner of my bedroom, I wiped my tears. Gathering my pain, I gingerly poured it back into its jar, capped it tightly, and gently placed it on the highest shelf of my heart. However, tonight, this familiar ritual included placing this woman’s memory on the shelf next to my jar.

My fingers once again found the keyboard, and I finished typing the report.

I frequently visit this woman, up on my heart-shelf. I find myself whispering to her, whispering my fragmented, broken thoughts I can confide in no one else.

I wonder what she would whisper back.