Silence

I lied. Let me post something personal one more time.

During my last EMT-B class today, one of the paramedics gave us a final talk before he released us for our lunch break. "This is going to be a hard story for me to tell," he said, leaning onto the podium with an expression of utmost somberness. "But it's something you all need to hear before you walk into this profession."

He told us about the emotional call he and his crew were dispatched to Wednesday night. They were met at the door of a residential home by a distraught father whose infant daughter had suddenly stopped breathing. The paramedic brought the daughter into the back of the ambulance where they applied an EKG to monitor her heart. When he saw the flat line -- asystolic -- that appeared, he already knew that the chances of bringing her back were less than four percent. As they ventilated the daughter and tried to regain a pulse, the father opened the back doors of the ambulance and tried to be with his daughter, but due to EMT standard operations, he was asked to step out of the ambulance. The infant daughter was transported with lights and sirens to the hospital, but deep down the paramedic knew. When the father and mother finally arrived to the hospital, the doctor was the one who had to tell them that their baby girl was gone.

It doesn't seem to make any sense. The girl's twin brother was perfectly healthy. He was still alive, and now she was dead. As far as we know, she had become just another statistic in the fatality count for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

"I have to admit to you all, I've been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ever since this happened," the paramedic told us. "Logically, I know that I did all I could have done. When it comes down to the percentages, there was nothing I could have done to bring her back. But I'm still left feeling as if I could have done something to save her. I know I will be fine in a few weeks, and I will be able to go back to work as usual. But I know that there are others who won't be able to handle it. So now I'm telling you all this. Think about how you will be able to handle it if a patient dies under your care. If you cannot, then this profession is not the right one for you. And it's not shameful to admit so at all; in fact, it's a noble thing to do."

I talked to my friend and EMT classmate S about this as we ate dinner this evening. We speculated how we would react in the situation. When it comes to me, I really have no idea how I would react. I am convinced that my tear ducts did not mature properly, because I will barely shed a tear when everyone around me is weeping. I do not cry when I watch tragedies -- despite the fact that they are my favorite literary/film genre. I did not cry during the "Every Fifteen Minutes" presentation on the consequences of drunk driving when boxes of tissues were being passed up and down the bleachers. After Iris died -- the first personal death I ever experienced in my life -- I never cried for anyone's death again -- not Elissa, not Marcus, not Mrs. Edwards, not even my maternal grandfather, whom I hadn't seen for nearly a decade. But that sure as hell doesn't mean I couldn't feel it.

The reason why I love tragedies, why I prefer songs in minor keys, is because of that deep stirring nothing else seems to evoke for me. Gut-wrenching may be cliche, but it is the best description I can think of. It's a weight somewhere deep inside of you, twisting and churning in your insides. At least, that's what it's like for me. It's painful but it's relieving. Nothing else makes me feel quite so alive.

There's a girl I knew once. Her name was Elena. Other than a handful of people, I never developed real friendships with the girls I met through tennis tournaments. It is difficult to be friends with the girls you are pitted against in matches. Girls take losses personally. They won't speak to you if you beat them in a match until the next time they turn the tables and beat you. While I wasn't close with Elena, she was at least one of the girls I was friendly with. While she was competitive, she was a cheerful girl who never hesitated to say hello to me. We grew up together in a sense, as we moved up through the USTA junior divisions together. I watched her transition from a girl in cotton t-shirts and braids to a young lady in dri-fit Nike dresses and silver hoop earrings.

If it weren't for Facebook, I don't know when I would have found out. I don't know when I would have learned that Elena had died in a car accident this evening.

I'm not sure why it is affecting me so much. Mrs. Edwards died just a week ago, and while I loved her as a teacher, I only felt a graze of pain. I suppose part of it is that Elena is my age. When you are an eighteen-year-old college student, you don't think about dying. Your eyes are locked onto the future. You have dreams. When you're suddenly reminded of your mortality in this way... it is like a kick in the gut.

I can still see Elena in my mind, despite the fact that I haven't spoken to her for two years ever since I quit playing tennis tournaments in the middle of my junior year. I can still remember her mother, the way she referred to her cell phone's battery life as "juice", the way she would watch her daughter's matches from behind the chained fence with her sunglasses shielding the emotion in her eyes. I can't help but wonder how her mother is doing now.

I've been doing a lot rethinking about my story these days. I've reached the point in my life where I can see the grains of sand slipping down the hourglass. My goal is to finish it by the end of 2011. It may be near impossible, given the increasing workload I will be receiving with each following semester. But something inside me has been nagging me not to put things off much longer.

In my spare time, whether on the bus or before drifting off to sleep, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. Why did I create a character whom I knew would be dead right from the start? Why did I create a character like Rory knowing I would never give her the chance to live? Rory is based off of another person I barely knew whose passing also affected me in a very strange way. As I've been spending more time working out the details in the storyline, it occurred to me just how much of a presence death -- be it Rory or Charlotte's mother -- plays in each half of the story.

And I don't even know why I have this bizarre relationship with sadness. A masterclass pianist once asked my former piano teacher if I had ever been through a traumatic event. The answer was no -- my parents were happily married, my best friends were alive and well, I had never been through life-changing hardships like poverty. He was surprised by the capacity of sorrow I could feel and interpret, despite the fact that absolutely nothing "sad" has ever happened to me in my life.

Am I cut out to be in the medical field? It's funny. I spend so much time stressing about insignificant numbers like GPA's, and in the end I feel like none of it has anything to do with numbers at all.