2020

Life turned upside down in a matter of days. On March 13, the governor closed schools. My husband and I met friends for dinner that night. We were nervous and opened the restaurant’s door with a Lysol wipe and carried hand sanitizer inside. On March 16, restaurants and gyms shut down. It was my son’s 15th birthday and he almost cried when I didn’t let him go to a friend’s house. We’d promised him dinner at a steakhouse. Instead, we got takeout, and he was too sad to eat cake.

“Did they finally pull you out of the hospitals and clinics?” My father’s voice resonated through the receiver.

“Yeah,” I replied with my eyes fixed on my whirling ceiling fan. “I figured it was inevitable after the AAMC issued its recommendation for students to be pulled from direct patient care, given the uncertainties surrounding the supply of PPE and the potential harms of having more people than necessary in clinical environments.” My father knew those abbreviations referred to the Association of American Medical Colleges, which governs the education of medical students, and to personal protective equipment, like surgical masks and gloves.

People don’t die like they do in the movies–alive one minute, saying something profound, and dead the next. There is a way the body is programed to die. Most of us don’t think about that, don’t know about it, and generally don’t want to know about it. We live in a death-denying society.

But as a nurse, I have spent most of my life talking about death, and now more than ever I want to explain the normal way the body dies.