It’s ironic. I’m a medical student, have worked for six months in the wards. I talk to patients and their families every day, am present for the discussions with the family about “Do Not Resuscitate” orders and quality of life. One day, I will be the one who signs the death certificate.

But I have never seen death, except in an anatomy lab where we didn’t talk about bodies, but cadavers, as if there was something different about lying on a cold table with chemicals infused in the tissue than resting underground. My patients who have passed on did so late at night or in a care facility and I was not involved. By the time I found out, the sheets had been changed and another person had taken over the room–the hospital is never lacking in the ill.

I’ve never had a person close to me die. My mom’s dad died when she was 15. She doesn’t talk about him much, just a little bit about how he worked hard but still would laugh with his family at night. But he worried all the time, about how the world was going to pieces, and according to the family, that’s what killed him at 49. My other grandparents are getting older, but are still in relatively good health, and it’s hard to imagine them not being around for several more years.

One of my friend’s father died on Friday, an unexpected heart attack. Sam’s grandfather died Sunday morning–he had been in the ICU for a week, but he had just been sent home with health care, expected to live a few more years, so he could go to Sam’s wedding in a year, or at the very least, be around for the Christmas party in a week.

Adding to this feeling of entrapment, I got to school today, and found out that one of the medical students had died in an avalanche on Saturday. He was the boyfriend of Chris’s old roommate. I met him several times, he had a nice laugh and we all ate dinner together once. I know his girlfriend very well. She’s a fourth year, with a bright smile and full of advice on how to survive my clerkships and drove Chris nuts because she is too messy as a roommate. But there’s a picture of her in the news paper, sobbing.

I’m not writing this begging for sympathy. All of these people were just acquaintances, people who floated in and out of the periphery of my life… except their deaths affect people close to me. And I am at a lose for words of comfort over a telephone, a gesture beyond a silent hug, which I hope conveys all of the pain that I feel for them.

I’m not exactly scared of death… I believe in an afterlife and I have seen enough in the past month to realize that there are many things worse than death. Lying in a bed, a tube breathing for you, your mind shut down and unable to respond, just waiting for an infection or another stroke to kill you. But it’s a different thing when it’s a blink of an eye, unexpected and unfair… Now, my mind is filled with worries and what-ifs. It’s been creeping closer to me, and sooner or later, it will touch me personally. All of a sudden, I’m confronted with m own mortality and worse, that of my family and friends. It happens to everyone and soon, this protection of distance and impersonality will fail…

Article about Melvin’s death: http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_2487012