Page 4 of Ashes

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Everything around me felt far away except for the feel of my index finger drumming against the side of my thigh.

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

My steps faltered outside of the room where his wife, Jamie, was waiting on the other side. I knew I should take a moment before notifying her, but I decided to ignore the voice in my head and walked into the room.

His wife stood up from her seat. She looked behind me, waiting to see her late husband appear with a smile gracing her face, but it dimmed with every step I took toward her.

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

This part of the job was never easy, especially when it wasn’t expected. But as time went by, you got better at breaking the bad news, the words flowed out easier because you quickly learned that to carry out your job effectively, you needed to learn how to detach yourself from giving in to high emotions.

For me, learning this had been quite easy since I’d been doing it my whole life with everyone around me.

Lucky me, I guess.

Despite that, having to announce to a family their loved one was no longer with us just weighed on you. And it never quite went away.

You always tried to remember every patient you helped, but the ones you lost… those stuck with you the most vividly.

I remembered my first time like it was yesterday. It was my first day at Monte Claro Hospital and we’d received a patient who’d been stabbed during a robbery.

She’d died within minutes of arriving in my care.

There was nothing I could’ve done because the assailant had removed the knife from her wound and nicked her aorta in the process, but I still carried the memory with me to this day.

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Craig’s wife quietly sobbed while I did my best to explain what happened and what we did until I ran out of useless words and got up, leaving her with her grief.

Once in front of the door that led back into the ER, I shook my hands out, swiped my badge, and stepped back onto the main floor.

The ache in my chest was quickly stored away by the chaos of the ER and I continued working, dealing with the back-to-back wave of patients flooding into the hospital until my shift ended.

After grabbing my things out of my locker, I made my way out of the hospital, but as soon as I stepped outside, my adrenaline quickly faded and was washed away by a bone-deep exhaustion.

Pushing it away once again, I walked over to my car and drove home.

I parked my car in my parents’ driveway and shut off the engine, then threw the keys into the passenger seat.

Just one minute.

I leaned back into my seat and closed my eyes.

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

All the pressure that had built throughout the day and that I’d kept storing away finally swept over me.