Living in Death's Shadow
The dangling question mark at the end of all our experiences.
My work as a nurse is hard. I see a lot of gory things. Body horror is part of the job. I’ve seen festering ischial wounds so deep I could place my whole fist inside of them and knock on the hip bone. I’ve seen all five of a homeless man’s frostbitten toes slough away from his metatarsals like over-cooked, blackened meat. I’ve seen a man cut off mid-sentence by a rupturing abdominal aorta, fall to his knees, and deflate like a balloon within minutes as he bled out internally. And these are just a tiny fraction of the things I’ve seen over the years. It adds up.
And I’m not alone. This is the way things are for nurses. And after these types of things happen, after we see all of this, we are expected to pretend nothing has happened and continue our shift like a robot. Nothing to see here. Cover it with a dressing and clean up the dregs of the code. Time to move on to the next thing, the next task, the next small emergency.
An elderly, confused lady has fallen in the room down the hall because you’ve been too busy working with these disturbing events to keep an eye on her. And there is an earful waiting for you from the man in Room 17 because his call bell has been going off for twenty minutes, and there was no one other than you to answer it. He feels it is of utmost importance that you remove his used urinal from his room right away. “Oh, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, sir. I’ve only been busy performing unsuccessful compressions on a fifty-year-old man who was set to be discharged back to his family tomorrow, but instead is on his way down to the morgue.”
Such is the state of Tayloristic health care in the 21st century.
What am I getting at here? Yes, my work as a nurse is hard. But there’s no turning back now. I cannot unsee what I’ve seen. And now with the internet, we are probably all seeing more suffering and pain than we can process. What does one do with all this tragedy? It’s hard for me to believe in any of our religious traditions anymore. I don’t know if we go anywhere when we die or if it’s just lights out. At this point, I’m just trying to figure out how we can hold up under the weight of suffering we must endure while we’re here. How can one make sense of it?
I used to soothe myself with the idea that this world is a type of ‘Earth-school’ for souls. That we are here to learn and to strengthen our souls through suffering or work out our Karma, or something like that and in the end we will be rewarded with a kinder, gentler existence. A garden of Eden-type Paradiso, perhaps? But it’s getting pretty hard for me to believe any of that now.
The blatant grifting on the internet has shown me how belief systems and power are inextricably bound together. It’s easy to see how the sausage gets made. From Christian Nationalism to the Big Wellness cults, someone is out there selling a belief system in exchange for money, power, fame or all three. Priest classes form in all human societies. People who are imbued with the magical power to distract us with a clearly defined narrative that will save us from being food for worms. And people are only too happy to pay. All that is needed is a good story that can be shaped like a container around the seeds of our fear and loathing, where all of our terrified anxieties can be poured and kept hidden from view.
As our family and friends succumb to these New Religious Movements, where does that leave the rest of us? The old Kierkegaardian leap of faith is failing. Some of us more science-oriented types try to turn to Quantum Mechanics, but the truth of this phenomenon is even weirder and more unsettling than anything we’ve come up with so far. And still, this tells us nothing about why we must suffer in all the ways that we do.
And so I’m just hanging here, experiencing these things, having no idea why they are happening and what I’m supposed to do about them in the grand scheme of things. I clean the wounds and sop up the effluent. I try to help people be more comfortable in their suffering with pain meds, dry incontinence briefs, and warm blankets. But I know, like Sisyphus, I’ll be back again tomorrow to roll the same rock up the same hill. Some people will die, some people will get discharged, and a new crop of very sick and distressed people will cycle in with problems which, after nearly fifteen years of doing this, look uncannily similar to the previous ones.
And it’s not just because I’m a nurse that I am here in this existential void. In our modern world, I think many of us have arrived at this point. All the things that the modern world has promised us have not delivered the kind of satisfaction we thought they would. We may have temporarily found meaning in our work or some kind of vague idea that we could ‘contribute’ to ‘making the world a better place’. But in the shadow of Trumpism and unhinged utopianism, what does it mean anymore to ‘make the world a better place’?
Our myths and stories are all about beating back the darkness with victory over the dragon. But what does victory mean when we know that in the end we will lose? Every single one of us will lose. There is no bulwark between us and the inevitable deep. Transhumanists have their dreams of immortality. I believe these people are the most terrified of us all. They can’t enjoy a moment of their lives because death is constantly biting at their psyches like vicious hounds.
At any rate, we want to believe that our consciousness survives after death, but I’m not so sure anymore. I think at this point the best thing I can hope for is a resolution to the pain. Agnosticism seems like a good place to settle for me. But the question remains, how to live with all this death and suffering and evil in the face of total uncertainty?
The only thing left to me is to practice experiencing every moment, every day, without expectation. Because even now, after witnessing all the pain and suffering of this world on full display, I can still see the bittersweet beauty of our existence and am incredibly awed by the fact that we are here to experience anything at all.
“I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world”
- Louis Armstrong
It never ceases to amaze me that others can’t see it too. On the contrary, many people are busy destroying it, being reckless with it, revelling in their cruelty and callousness towards it. Some people work very hard to make a hard situation infinitely worse. For the most part, I try to avoid these types of people and keep them out of my close inner circle. But obviously, there is no avoiding them in my work or in the broader world. My old ideas of making the world a better place had something to do with changing these tragic people somehow. Because if they were changed, then my world would be a better place, wouldn’t it? If they could miraculously be made to enjoy life just a little, then things would be better, right? They would then stop attacking me with their displaced distress, wouldn’t they? But I see now this is the very line of thinking that rains down excess horror upon us. This is the seed that starts the cycle. It all seems very innocent at first, but it’s a slippery slope from “I am just trying to show you a better way to live” to “You must be forced to live in the way I prescribe at the barrel of my gun.”
So the only alternative is to stay calm and let the destructive cycles people entrench themselves in play themselves out. At least until they are good and ready to engage with something more constructive. Because, despite all the world’s destructiveness, I can see there are many, many more people like me, the silent majority, struggling to keep the lights on, the home fires burning, and the hospital beds staffed and ready for the next set of suffering souls who need them. This little contribution is something I have spent years developing the skills to offer, and it has to be enough. As for the rest of it, I will have to make do with the dangling question mark at the end of all my experiences, whether they be horrifically gory or awe-inspiringly beautiful. Because this life holds it all, without apology, regardless of whether I can deal with it or not.
Thank you for reading🙏.