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I don’t usually introduce my blogs, but this is
a special case. In a sense, this will involve a bit of time travel. After
living in Europe for several years, I returned to the United States and
enrolled in a medical assistant training program. I obtained work as a ward
clerk in a hospital and began college courses. At some point, either in my
training or during my work as a ward clerk, I witnessed CPR done on an elderly
woman. The following essay was written about the incident for an English course
I was taking. FYI, the piece and its title, “In Training for Oblivion” are
copyrighted. Thanks
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“In Training for Oblivion”....
Copyright 1974/2009 ....
By GayleMyrna....
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She lay
there with her arms dangling brutally from her pale time-bloated flesh. Her
mouth was opened obscenely beyond comfort with no more sensory signals sent to
close it. ....
The
emergency room personnel were done. Done with savagely intent pounding presses
to her chest with its heart tissue bitterly refusing to respond. Done with
pouring oxygen into her eighty-one year old lungs whose bellows man finally
decided to take a break. Done with surrounding her in a modern tribal ritual to
determine if her body continued with the living or joined the dead. They were
done. She was done. Done with breathing, done with heart beats, blood
circulating, muscles working, and done with that inexpressible light in her
eyes that is only the property of the living.....
Her body had
crossed a lifetime. She was likely someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s
friend, and at one time, someone’s child. In her last event she was surrounded
by youthful strangers whose white uniforms emphasized the vigor and warm colors
of their flesh. They were so bursting with energy, their heads so un-gray as to
not see themselves as a point in time between childhood and frail, breathless
old age.....
Now that her
body had completed its cycle of aliveness, what happened to the child that once
had endless time before her? In her last flicker of consciousness, did her
memory lurch back to its earliest instants, were her beginnings played out in
the memory cells of her brain one more time, a little girl playing among the
ribbons of molecules where no one else in the universe could ever find her?....
What
happened to the young woman who shared the same body? Her cells and tissues had
metamorphized so many times as to render her almost a species alien to her own
youth. Now she had reached her final
stage of development. How strange we progress from child to old age without a
stabilization at adulthood. Why must our bodies slide downhill? ....
Was she
afraid to end? Where did her spirit – consciousness – soul – personality – call
it what you will, where did it go? Did she simply end? Was she sent back to
“point A”, that being all the unconscious eons before her birth? Where did she
go? ....
On our side
of this dimension she was done. The breathing apparatus pushed away, the
intravenous fluids removed, the personnel dwindling. All that was left was one
no longer hungry, no longer lusting, no longer desiring of anything we are
bound to, body. Now she would be described as “meat” in some hospital workers
calloused descriptions. Wasn’t this nirvana - total lack of earthly desires and
needs? Then we’ll all achieve it in time.....
Somewhere
else in the hospital the newly born whimpered and tested their voices. Eighty
years hence, would their worn out bodies and lives be found sprawled in naked
un-dignity in some emergency room encircled by strangers who couldn’t remotely
imagine their distant babyhoods? Meanwhile, the race was over. She had won. She
had been eighty-one years in training for oblivion.....