Things I Want to Do Before I Go Back to School:

...make a list of things I want to do before I go back to school.

The only thing I can think of putting on that list right now is "go to the beach". I really, really, really need some ocean in my life. The ocean is my only source of pure aloha now that I've got that mainland fever.

I feel so landlocked.

I just want to feel sand under my feet and taste salt in the air.

The details of what landed me in the emergency room are still quite a mystery to me. Sometime between my friends going out for a cigarette and coming back in, I passed out. I guess I was taken outside for fresh air because I was really warm and, naturally, Public Safety found me and called an ambulance. Even now, I can still only remember being pulled out of an ambulance and wheeled into the all too familiar Redlands Community Hospital Emergency Room. Lying on my stretcher, not even bothering to shiver every time someone opened the door and the cold air swept over my body, I listened to nurses and doctors rush around me. Though I was hardly conscious, I knew something a little out of the ordinary was going on. With nothing else to do, I listened to their conversations. After about three minutes I had heard “nineteen”, “male”, and “full arrest”. It wasn’t difficult to put the pieces together. Moments later, the doors opened all the way and the boy the nurses had been talking about was brought in.

From where I was laying, I could see everything. One EMT pumped violently on the boy’s chest, but there was no response. Something in my gut told me there wasn’t going to be one either. Still, they tried for a few seconds more, and the boy’s body moved as though it were made out of some sort of jelly as the EMT continued pumping his chest, trying to get his heart to start. As they wheeled him into a room nearby, my gut-feeling was confirmed. A doctor walked out of the room, toward the only two people in the Emergency Room on edge— the boy’s parents. I listened as he explained to them that when the EMT’s arrived at his house, his pupils were already fully dilated; he was brain dead by the time they got to him. On top of that, he wasn’t responding to any sort of resuscitation.

“He’s not going to make it?” His father’s voice shook as he asked the words his wife was unable to. The entire staff in the Emergency Room hall looked toward the floor as if it were an easier way to say “I’m sorry, but no.” Naturally, the boy’s parents lost what little composure they had left. His father threw his arms in the air and burst into tears at the same time as his wife. As he took out his phone to break the news to the boy’s family and friends, the mother simply asked if she could go in the room and kiss her son.

Still lying on my stretcher, I felt wrong and ashamed for witnessing what I had just seen, but for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t ashamed because I had watched everything that happened; after all there wasn’t really any other option since I was lying in the hall anyway. I was ashamed and felt wrong because I didn’t completely understand the boy’s reactions. Not only that, but I felt nothing. I had just watched someone die. Shouldn’t that have evoked some sort of emotion? But regardless of what should’ve happened from what I had just seen, I couldn’t deny the fact that I hadn’t felt anything. I simply laid on my stretcher quietly, knowing it would be a while until a nurse got around to seeing me.

I watched as the boy’s family and friends came in and out of the hospital, some crying and others looking very angry. I waited to sympathize with at least one of them, but I was completely unable to. It bothered me; I couldn’t possibly be that detached from everything…could I? I continued wondering this until I saw my own mother walking toward me.

“Hey mama,” I said, my voice hardly audible. I could see tears in my mother’s eyes and as she attempted to ask me if I were okay, I cut her off. “I’ll be fine. There are bigger things going on right now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. Just then a nurse came up to my stretcher and injected morphine into my IV. Since I hadn’t eaten in three days, it hit me fast and I lay looking up at my mother as the warm, fuzzy feeling from the morphine took over my body. I could feel myself smiling as my body relaxed.

“I just watched a boy die,” I finally explained to her. She didn’t say anything so I continued to speak, “I didn’t feel anything at all. Nothing.” And with that I rolled over on to my side and let the morphine take over.

When I woke up, I was by myself. I had no concept of time, nor was I sure of anything that was going on with me. What I couldn’t get out of my head though was the fact that I had watched that boy die and didn’t feel an ounce of anything about it. I let my mind wander to how I felt about death and realized that maybe this was just the way I had conditioned myself. Suddenly, I wanted to share this feeling with the rest of the world. It didn’t matter to me if I were to die, if someone else were to die, or we all were dying; it was bound to happen and I was at peace with that.

Since a very early age—eight to be exact— I have been completely at peace with the idea of death and dying. As I have gotten older though, I have come to find that most people are not like me. In my eyes, death is inevitable and anything that is inevitable is not worth worrying over or being afraid of. Not only that, but I find the idea of death comforting: knowing my life has a beginning, a middle, and (eventually) an end means that one day, my life story will be complete. Still, I can’t seem to get anyone else to understand this. Most of the time people tell me that when I’m on my death bed or actually facing death I will change my mind. I do my best not to disagree, but after watching that boy die I can say almost certainly that death does not scare me or bother me in the least.