What is the Point?

My father went to the ER in April 2020 after developing an unrelenting fever and worsening shortness of breath. At the time this all happened, the COVID diagnosis was not surprising, but still, I felt the floor give way beneath me.

From the phone calls letting me know my father had fallen ill to the phone call informing me he had passed, I was in free-fall. Even afterwards, I kept falling. The wind was whistling by my face, and it became the song stuck in my head as the ground rushed up to greet me.

Yet somehow the parachute deployed and I tumbled softly. I dusted myself off and I found my rhythm. I found it in the alpha rhythm of the posterior dominant rhythm on EEG after EEG, and in the songs I would make up to lull our infant to sleep. We moved homes, and a few years later, we moved again. And for a time, I could breathe.

Until, I couldn't.

When I'm in the clinic, it's not just medication management and ordering tests. I try to hold space for my patients. I carry their emotions with me through the visit, and when I walk out the door to the garage at the end of the day, they still follow me home.

During residency, as I fielded updates from my father's hospital while taking care of patients in my own, there were moments during which I would wonder: what was the point? Of all of this? Life took a more philosophical bent, and I found myself looking at my world from above. We were ants milling about, beholden to tasks and duties which when considered against the backdrop of disease and death affecting people so close to me, felt absurd. I have to log hours? Finish up notes? Study? Stars were dying out in galaxies far away, civilizations were cycling between birth and death over centuries, and people were dying alone in hospital beds just down the hall.

What was the point?

What is the point?

My father was the patient in the bed, chest expanding and contracting, its pace kept by the large ventilator by their bedside. My husband is the patient describing their most recent seizures. And then they turn to ask me, "So you have you been, doc?"

I have a carved-out smile like a jack-o-lantern, my inner light flickering, unsteady.

It is still hard, hard to pretend that everything is just the same, prosaic, a workday sandwiched between errands and chores. I check their labs, then check my husband's. I check and respond to their messages, then ask my husband whether he sent messages to his treatment team.

I try to hold space for everyone. Space is limitless, I tell myself. But can I hold infinity within me?

I can still try, as best as I can. We're all ants, walking about. We talk about main character energy, but the truth is, none of us are main characters in our own story. We have our tasks and duties, and at first glance, the paths they may lead us on seem dull, boring, and with no clear end in sight. But maybe we are characters in a larger story, and sometimes, we cross paths with each other. Maybe, if we're lucky, some of those crossed paths may become a bright spot on a dark day. In our darkest moments, we can still be a light for someone else.

Maybe that's the point.