That fine line

I am distressed tonight. My work takes me into the teeth of death every day. Sometimes death is achingly slow, the creep of decay to which you know there can be only one resolution. Other deaths are jolting, an eyeblink, the wrench of surprise. We doctors feel it around us, and raise our fists, but know in a visceral way as few others do that all we can effect is delay.

And so I know, without a doubt, and with daily reminder, how temporary is my life, how fragile are my loves. I struggle with it each time I note my own happiness. From the moment Betty was conceived I feared and expected her death. Every day she was still alive inside me seemed incredible, and I never took her for granted. One horrible day I stopped feeling her flips and kicks and was immediately ready for the worst. The moment I registered at Maternity triage she kicked, and I was amazed. "Your heart is still beating," I thought to her in congratulation. "You're still here, still surviving."

In moments of deep newborn sleep I would put my hand on her stomach and wait for the rise with her next breath. In that instant I was suspended between joy and grief, two divergent expectations from my questioning touch. And then she breathed, and it was joy.

I wonder if I am obsessed with death, too preoccupied. But how can I not be? I'm suspended in illness six days a week. Today my pager screeched and I hurried to the bedside of a young woman whose eyes had the glass of death over them as my classmate pumped her pale chest. Her mother cried outside the room and called to her baby, a girl suspended between life and death. Two hours later her berth was empty and ready for the next battered body to be delivered and its fate played out. Today was her last day of life, but for some reason mine went on. For some reason my baby is breathing and smiling and my husband is smiling and I'm so, so happy and know just how lucky I am. I don't know how many days, how many hours we have together, we three, but no matter how we spend them I am counting them up in my heart, so sweet and so lovely.

And if I or they or we were gone this instant, I have been happy, so happy while we lived.