The Man Who Asked Why

It was a long day. The kind of day that drains the soul. The emergency room buzzed with chaos: three major car accidents, a life lost before we even had a chance, and the rest clinging to the edge in ICU.

On top of that, there had been an incident—an unrestrained patient, brought in under Section 2 (Mental Health Act), smashing through triple-glazed doors like they were nothing. He terrified the new ward administrator so badly that she never came back. Not even to collect her things. By the time my shift ended, I was a shell of myself, yearning for nothing more than a quiet bath to wash away the day.

But as I stepped out of the hospital’s main entrance, I never saw him coming.

He emerged from the shadows like a phantom, startling me as he gripped my hand. His fingers were rough, trembling slightly, but his eyes—they were steady and piercing, as though they could see the very core of me.

“Why?” he asked, his voice low but full of anguish.

The single word hit me like a slap.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I stammered, trying to keep my voice calm.

But he didn’t let go. His gaze stayed locked on mine, his question hanging heavily in the cold night air.

“Why did you let me live? Why did you save me when I was dying? Why didn’t you let me go?”

My heart stilled. At first, I didn’t recognise him, his face gaunt and hollow, his clothes tattered. Then it came rushing back, vivid and terrible.

I remembered him. He had been wheeled into the ER weeks ago, barely alive, a walking tragedy of neglect and suffering. A terminal illness, they said—but it wasn’t the illness that had nearly killed him. It was his family.

They’d stopped caring for him. He had been left to rot in his own waste, bedsores blooming into deep, festering wounds. He was starving, broken in body and spirit. When they finally brought him to the hospital, it wasn’t out of love—it was to let him die there, to make him someone else’s problem.

But we didn’t let him die. I didn’t let him die.

I had taken charge of his care, refusing to let him slip away like an afterthought. My team and I bathed his frail body in salt water to heal his sores. We fed him, nurtured him, gave him hope where there had been none. Slowly, impossibly, he began to recover.

When the day came for his discharge, I remember the flicker of light in his eyes, the small smile on his lips. No one from his family came to pick him up. No one cared enough to see him leave. But he left, alive, walking out with a new chance at life.

And now here he was, standing before me, alive but broken in a different way. His family had rejected him, cast him out like he was nothing. His wife had moved on, finding solace in another man. He had nowhere to go. Nothing to live for. And all he wanted was an answer to his torment.

“Why did you save me?” he whispered again, his voice cracking.

My instincts screamed at me to call for help, to get the security guards watching from the lobby to intervene. But something in his eyes made me stay. I wasn’t afraid of him. I was heartbroken for him.

“I’m a nurse,” I said, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to sound steady. “It’s my job to save lives. I don’t decide who deserves to live or die—I just… help people.”

Tears welled in his eyes. “But I didn’t want this life,” he said, his voice raw. “Not this.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have the words to fix the ache in his heart, the crushing weight of rejection and loneliness. All I could do was hold his gaze and hope that, somehow, he would see a flicker of the same hope we had fought so hard to give him.

Eventually, he let go of my hand and turned away, disappearing back into the night.

I still think about him. I wonder where he went, whether he found peace, whether he ever forgave me for giving him another chance. Some nights, when the hospital is quiet and I’m left alone with my thoughts, I hear his voice again.

“Why?”

And I wonder, too.