"Sometimes Life is Not Ours to Save"

As an EMT, you are at war with death. Collateral damage is inevitable. And sometimes, in the middle of the battle, you wonder why we fight at all. On a sweet spring morning, I am struggling to push a Combitube down the throat of an elderly woman when I glance up to see her husband, silent and teary eyed in the corner, and I wish we hadn't been called at all. I wish he had simply put the phone down and held her hand as she died. Instead we push back the little wooden table where their coffee cups still rest, and we tear at her clothes, poke and prod her, shock her weary  heart, strap her to a plastic board and scream away, and she will die anyway. The first time you press on the chest of an elderly person, the ribs separate from the sternum, popping like a string of soggy firecrackers. There are times when rescue is nothing more than organized physical assault. Sometimes I wish we would just leave people be, let them slip quietly over the vale. Sometimes life is not ours to save.

From "The Big Nap" by Michael Perry