the Reaper

The day I met you 

they upgraded a patient from one of the floors.

We think she's bleeding out, the handoff said.

The stretcher rolled into the ICU and there she was, a paper doll,

crumpled among blankets, blanched whiter than the sheets.

No sooner had she arrived than she coded.

I checked alarms and answered call bells while a team more capable than I

coded and coded and coded her.

Several times I looked up and watched you at the bedside,

bold-faced, flushed, intent,

waiting your turn for compressions, while physicians more senior than you 

tried to reclaim the scythe-stilled heart,

and beside you the Reaper, unthreatened, unmoved,

knowing this one was already gone.

And finally we surrendered to the inevitable, to the fact 

that sometimes death will not negotiate,

sometimes all we can do is agree.

Then her husband came in, bowed and ashen as her still face,

and he sat in his wheelchair in the doorway of the room

and wept.

And I listened to him crying, why?

in my heart all the rest of the shift, 

through our first conversation,

in the beep of the time clock,

up the stairs of the parking garage,

why why why in my mind, his face and yours,

opening the door of my car to find the passenger seat already occupied

by something darker, more familiar 

than the shadows of the worn-out fluorescent lights.

And as I buckled in I wondered aloud, why

was your heart already gone too far for me to claim?

and why must we even catch sight of 

the beginnings the Reaper crushes in his restless claws?

Then before I drove home I put my head on the steering wheel

and I cried the old husband’s refrain,

while the Reaper, unmoved, put down his scythe,

picked up his watermarked deck of fate,

shuffled our overlapping cards apart

and played Solitaire in my passenger seat.