Broken in All the Right Places

Life is Unfair

I vividly recall my last steps. My feet moved slowly along a narrow concrete path leading from our front door to the sidewalk illuminated by a streetlight on that chilly early summer morning. I had that feeling of something being wrong without the anxiety that usually accompanies it. Leaning on the arm of my fiancé, I walked hearing only the scraping of shoes on pavement as we moved towards the family van waiting to drive me to the emergency room. Through the window along the 20-minute drive, I watched the blackened silhouettes of the rural Wisconsin countryside passing by as I felt myself slipping away.
After that, my memory fades in and out. Troubled faces of those I loved looking on helplessly. Placed in a wheelchair from the van, I sat in at the receptionist desk. A room with a hospital bed and being lifted onto it while our family doctor kept saying my name with his distinctive Indian accent, but his usual relaxed and cheerful nature was abruptly replaced with impatience and seriousness. The concerned voices of the nurses and my doctor quickly turned to alarm and urgency as they feverishly worked around me were becoming a blurred backdrop. “No blood pressure” and “slowing pulse” are words I remember. The repeated attempts to start an IV captured the last bit of attention and anxiety I had left. I recall something about putting a needle to my heart and conscious memory flickered out; I was dying.
I had lived a good life. I had experienced many different aspects of life. I had known all kinds of people and places. In many ways I had lived more in eighteen years than some had during a longer time. The last years had been a life lived to the fullest. The path of discovering and defining who I would become and what I would do with my future was full of expectations and idealism. I guess I was much like most people my age; indignant that the world was not what I had hoped for, and wishing I felt more “grown up” and in control. It seemed at that moment on August 13, 1988, at age eighteen, two weeks short of turning nineteen was the most grown up I would ever be. My young dying body was in the hands of the helicopter medical evac team evacuating me from rural Wisconsin to the University Hospital in Madison. A three-hour trip in car, I have no idea how long it took in the helicopter. I have no memory of any of it. I had lost consciousness much earlier. I can only imagine the faces of my fiancé and my parents as that helicopter flew away. They had been told to hope and pray for the best, but to expect the worst.
All that schooling and homework, papers, and especially math, for nothing! Life is so unfair! So is death. Obviously, I mean, not to break the suspense but, I lived, but how many times in the following days, weeks, months and years did I wish this life had ended right here. A tragic end? Perhaps, but it would have been an end on a high note with a lot of loose ends tying up beautifully. Looking back, it made for a good romantic tragedy of a young Christian girl trying to sort out her circumstances and her relationships with God and those around her. Just as happily ever after was finally in sight, but before it could be spoken or more realistically, messed up, it would just read, “The End.”