Time Goes On...

On my first day of Respiratory Therapy school our professor took us on a tour of the hospital. While we were walking through vacant treatment rooms in the ER, an ambulance brought in a cardiac arrest patient. Before that day, I had never watched someone die. We students stood back and watched the heart team work diligently to resuscitate this man. After what seemed a very long time, they pronounced him dead and marked his time of death. Then the staff set to work unplugging various tubes from him and clearing equipment from the room.

I remember watching the nurse cover the man with a sheet, just like I had seen done in movies and yet nothing like it at all. This was real. A person's life had just ended. The emergency over, it was time to continue our hospital tour and we began filing out of the room. As I turned around to look at the sheet-covered man one last time, I noticed his arm had slipped out from under the sheet and dangled off to the side.

There it was, the watch on his wrist, its second hand continuing to mark time, oblivious to what had just happened.

I thought it was so metaphorical and I've never forgotten it. "Life goes on," it said to me.