care labor is a wild thing
sometimes death work is sitting at the edge of the veil, doing everything you can to make sure we don’t walk through it. sometimes it’s reaching a hand over and past the veil, planting your feet heavy into the sterile linoleum hospital floor, and tugging us back this way, not yet, too soon.
sometimes death work is not actually about death. sometimes it’s very much about the living.
these are the facts:
he threw up a river of blood. it spilled over the edge of the bucket, stained the bright yellow sheets and the dark maroon edge of the carpet. the carpet is still stained. don’t look too closely.
I called the ambulance, brought the EMTs upstairs, followed them back down and then in the car, too far behind them to hear the sirens. I wonder what they sounded like, screaming down the highway towards the sea.
the (all women) surgeon team pulled me aside, later, some unknown number of hours later when it was already day again, somehow, but we hadn’t moved, or maybe we had moved and time had stood still - I’m still not sure which passed by whom. she peered into my face, said, “we’re about to pull a fire alarm, but I need you to know that there isn’t actually a fire right now, okay?”
I nodded, planted my feet heavy into the sterile linoleum hospital floor. they wore birkenstocks too, and I thought, how lucky that I happened to bring home the right kind of arch support. and then I thought, why on earth am I thinking about arch support right now.
I’ve never seen a roil of clinicians before, but a rapid response team is a roiling of attendings and charge nurses and pharmacists and residents. They spilled inside and outside, surrounded the bed, chattered and clucked about possibilities so much that he pulled my face close to his to mutter, “why on earth are they talking so loudly I can’t sleep.” I stroked the soft skin on the back of his hand, pressed wet paper towels above his eyes. There is no fire, they said, but we could all smell the smoke.
there is no fire yet, they said.
sunset over the Atlantic, coastal Massachusetts — July 2026
It is three weeks later (I think - I am still not sure, did time pass by me or did I pass by time?). We are catching our breath again, in the scratchy yellow-orange light of Canadian forest fires, the haze drifting down along the coast. I plant my feet into the cool saltwater of the Atlantic, this time. The beachgoers sing Take Me Home, Country Road and I Want It That Way late into the night, off kilter and uproarious. I press my nose into the glass, close the door. The clock ticks echoing against the tile in the bathroom is too loud, my nails on the keyboard are too loud, the hum of the refrigerator is too loud. The six IV monitors beeping through my dreams are still too loud.
I walk into the sea, and the roar of the waves drowns it all out. The wind pushes my earbuds out of my ears - twice - and I finally sigh alRIGHT, I GET it, a petulant toddler rolling my eyes at the streaks of clouds chiding me, and listen to the sound of my toes stumbling into pebbles instead.
I kept vigil so long by the veil, planted my feet and tugged so hard — and now we are back on this side, and I am not yet quite sure how to rejoin the land of the living.