The stretcher looked different from the 100s of others I’d seen. It was empty and it had an unexpected metal bar at the head of the bed. I glanced in the room outside which the stretcher had stopped. On the bed was a white bag, zipped up, and just the height and length of a sleeping human. I realized the stretcher was there to take a body to the morgue.

Death has been present on many of my hospital shifts – especially in the ICU (intensive care unit) where this sighting occurred. Yet, until this moment, I hadn’t seen the patients who died taken out of their rooms. I’d pronounced them dead. I’d seen patients’ families crying at bedside. I’d seen the closed doors with butterflies on them marking that someone was dying or dead. I’d seen the strangely empty and freshly made beds where those who had died once lay.

The body in the white bag was lifted onto the stretcher. White sheets surrounded them. Then they were wheeled to the morgue – their family wouldn’t see them again. Of course, the person’s soul was gone well before the body was put in a white bag. Off to a better place. If nothing else, watching many people die has made me certain there is a soul which leaves when death calls. To where the soul goes after death, no one knows.  Long ago, I decided to believe souls always go to a better place when the body dies. No one can prove my theory wrong, so no need to worry about the journey of souls.

The sighting of the white bag made me sad. It wasn’t the kind of sadness that made me feel like crying. It was more of a sinking feeling placed on top of an already crummy night. Heaviness on the chest and shoulders. We had multiple sick patients. My co-resident had pronounced dead a patient almost every night that week. Somehow, he’d gotten that burden. I had not pronounced anyone that week; I was caring for people who were staying alive (for the time being). It was night shift, making the already dreary worse. A string of unpleasant nights with one-way transport of white bags out of the ICU. Some of these nights were so busy we only just managed to do the things most necessary. Our patient list was younger than it should have been. It’s easier to accept death when people have lived a long life. Of course, there were a couple happier cases; those patients would make it out of the ICU and then the hospital.

I don’t think one can ever get used to witnessing death. One can come to peace with it. That’s what I’ve done as my years in medicine accumulate. There is an intrinsic link between life and death. The two cannot be separated and are not whole without each other. In the US, black usually represents death. In many other places, death is represented by white. The more time I spend in the hospital, the more I think white is the most representative of life’s end. Hospital white. A blank sheet. All the shades of light together. The absence of physical color. It seems fitting that death is represented by light and not physical being.

The image of the white bag lingered in my mental peripheral vision for the night. I didn’t know anything about the person whose body was in the bag. Sometimes, one doesn’t need to know the details to understand. Death is like that. Simple once it happens. How we arrive at death is what is complicated. Everyone eventually arrives there at their own time and in their own way. Death is one of the most unifying features of being human. But that doesn’t make it easy. Some things are never easy.