Click "Read Online" at the top of email for a better reading experience.

The Entry

She was ninety-two.

Her body was done,

her spirit was not.

They wheeled her in.

A secret everyone knew.

Her son beside her stretcher,

not speaking, not breathing,

as if the act of naming what was happening

might make it real.

Her grandson stood a few steps behind.

His face had that stubborn shine of youth,

that believed death was negotiable.

They asked for everything.

Every drip, every tube, every chance,

however small.

They wanted life,

not because they believed it could be given,

but because they couldn’t bear to stop asking for it.

The machines hummed, the fluids ran.

And I, standing there with my silence,

wondered how much of medicine was mercy…

and how much was denial.

We inject comfort into grief,

press dopamine into guilt,

run saline through disbelief.

Sometimes,

I think we treat not the dying,

but the living.

The False Hope

The grandson kept pacing.

He had that look

that mixed anger and pleading,

like a man arguing with God behind closed doors.

He wanted numbers.

Sodium, Potassium, Lactate, Creatinine.

The language of control.

He wanted to wrestle death in units and decimals.

But death doesn’t speak in numbers.

It speaks in pauses.

In the long, trembling silence

between one breath and the next.

He scrolled through his phone,

googling things he didn’t understand.

He wanted hope.

Not for her, but for himself.

Because hope, even false,

is easier to hold than emptiness.

And I stood there,

caught between silence and sadness,

watching generations

wrestle with the same ghost.

The Stillness

At 02:00 a.m., she started to slip.

No fight, no drama.

Just the quiet thinning of time.

The son begged.

The grandson wept.

And for a moment, I reached for adrenaline.

Because love can sound a lot like command.

But then I saw her hand. Wrinkled, still.

Resting like a question finally answered.

She had already left, gently,

without asking for permission.

They cried like men being born.

We drag the dying through our fear of loss.

And call it love.

We hold their hands too tightly,

so that when they go, our guilt has somewhere to sit.

Acceptance comes later.

Slow, limping and without grandeur.

Like a tired guest who knocks

after everyone has gone home.

The Understanding

The room emptied before dawn.

The family had left with their grief

folded neatly in silence.

Only her bed remained, blank and innocent.

I thought of all the times I had seen the same story.

Different faces, same ache.

We spend lives building walls against death,

forgetting that death is not the enemy.

And maybe medicine isn’t about saving,

but about standing witness.

To the sacred act of surrender.

We never truly do anything.

We only accompany.

We hold the hand,

we silence the alarms,

we watch.

And in watching,

we learn what mercy looks like.

A kind of lightness.

A release.

A forgiveness without words.

The son will carry guilt.

The grandson will remember the stillness more than the struggle.

And I,

I will keep writing it down,

so the world remembers what it costs to love.

Because in the end,

every code, every crash,

every whisper of “Do something”

leads to this:

the quiet realization

that sometimes,

the kindest act of all,

is nothing.

If this made you pause, forward it to someone who might need it.

WhatsApp, Facebook, or X - one click away.

More soon.

Another moment.

Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.

Yours,

Dr. Adarsh Nath,

Letters from the ER

Disclaimer:

Patient details have been changed to protect confidentiality. This is a personal reflection, not medical advice or substitute for professional care.