PRONOUNCED | Shaoli Chaudhuri

Time of death: 3:08 pm

The ventilator yawned into a dead, dreamy sleep. My hand felt like a clumsy fish, waving a light across clouded eyes.

The smell. The hospital room smelled of chlorhexidine and gardenias. The patient’s family had insisted on dabbing perfume onto her wrists—in spite of the charge nurse’s protests. The smell filled my nares, and I wished I had worn a surgical mask.

Still, I went through the motions quietly. Afterwards, I would report the death to organ donation. I wondered what would become of the heart and the liver and the kidneys and the eyes. Would they smell like gardenias?

It was my first time. But I was careful not to mention that.

Time of death: 8:10 am

My supervising resident murmured under his breath. Something about coffee and donuts. He did so as I held two of my fingers to a slender neck. It reminded me of a swan’s. Cool—yet soft under my nitrile-covered hands. Fragile in its stillness.

My stethoscope on the chest detected a hollow sound from within—or maybe without. I could hear a nothingness that made me want to tear my white coat up into ribbons. And perhaps my own skin along with it.

Time of death: 12:02 am

One year in, I was getting the hang of it. I cleared the room efficiently. I hunched over two legs and two arms and one trunk and a single non-beating heart.

The wall clock was particularly loud that night. The walls looked whiter than usual. The second hand ticked away, unheeding.

The patient—now body—had three daughters. Three women, petite and deferent, hovered outside the door. They said thank you to me one by one. I finally shuffled away, and I wondered what exactly they were thanking me for.

—

The Year

Time of death: 6:15 am
Time of death: 6:48 am
Time of death: 7:39 am
Time of death: 8:30 am
Time of death: 9:15 am

No, I’m sorry, no visitors are allowed.

Time of death: 10:20 am
Time of death: 11:09 am
Time of death: 11:09 am
Time of death: 11:58 am

No family. We are using iPads now.

Time of death: 1:15 pm
Time of death: 1:58 pm
Time of death: 2:09 pm

I am on the floor of the room of a patient who always makes me laugh and we are jamming an LMA down his windpipe and his daughter keeps on calling me and calling me and somehow my knees are now stained with Rorschach blotches of blood and I want to cry or perhaps vomit into my orange duckbill mask but instead I bark orders at the crowd gathered on the floor and I hook my lovely patient up to a ventilator from the 1980s. But Tina, she shakes her head at me and we look at the monitor together and the wave form is limp and totally lifeless.

Time of death: 3:30 pm
Time of death: 11:58 am
Time of death: 2:12 pm

I opt to join the Zoom call while I’m still at the hospital. It is my first Zoom funeral. Someone displays a photo of her face on the screen. Tina looks so young and pretty without a mask.

Time of death: 1:15 pm
Time of death: 1:18 pm
Time of death: 1:30 pm

No more. No more. No more.

—

Time of death: 7:15 pm

We had just finished more than ten rounds of grueling compressions. The hundred bodies that had somehow occupied the room moments before vanished in an instant. Now, it was only me left. Had they forgotten what still had to be done? I had already pounded my fists into this person’s sternum. I had already tried and failed to turn him away from death.

I felt…so absurdly tired. But I did it, anyway. When I went down to the basement to sign his death certificate, they asked me three different times if I was sure about the cause of death. Cardiac event isn’t an acceptable cause of death, they wheedled. What caused the cardiac event?

A bad heart, I replied dryly. They didn’t like that answer.

Time of death: 6:57 am

My shift would end in less than three minutes. I could have asked for a reprieve, but what was the point? My need for sleep would never trump this work.

This one was young. My age. I listened for breath sounds that would never come. Somehow, even with the stethoscope on her skin, I could hear the body’s mother and brother weeping outside in the hallway. I couldn’t explain it.

I read a memoir once about a writer whose husband died of a heart attack unexpectedly. She recounted how coldly the resident on call delivered the news on the phone. As if this death didn’t matter. Like neither he nor she mattered—in life nor in death. I thought of them through my shift, and into the next one. And the next. The next. Next.

My senses filled with the smell of chlorhexidine and a trace of something floral. I felt the sudden urge to curl onto the floor. I pushed it aside.

The weeping outside continued, its sound wedged in the bell of my stethoscope.

Shaoli Chaudhuri is an internist based in the South. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, and narrative medicine journals.

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