Three deaths. Sixty days. And a question I can't stop asking.
I am writing this twelve hours after the third death. Four hours after the cremation.
I don't know why I'm writing. Maybe because I don't know what else to do with it.
I am 28 years old.
In the last 60 days, I have stood in three hospital rooms. I have watched families make impossible decisions. I have held a ventilator tube in my hands and pulled it out.
I have cut a birthday cake at midnight with a man who was dead seven hours later.
I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to feel. But I know something shifted in me — permanently — about how I see death, suffering, and the way we refuse to talk about either.
April 17th.
My grandfather's brother. He wasn't the closest person to me, but his son was. And for seven days, I sat in that hospital watching him deteriorate — watching a family be held in suspension by doctors who kept offering hope when hope had quietly left the room.
His numbers weren't improving. Objectively. But the conversations kept going in circles — let's try this, let's wait and see, there's still a chance.
I don't blame the doctors. They were trying. They were doing their best with what they knew. But somewhere in those seven days, I started to see something I couldn't unsee: we have built an entire system around the idea that death is failure. That as long as machines are running, we are winning.
We weren't winning. We were just... not losing yet.
Eventually, the family made a call. They wanted to take him home. To let him die surrounded by people who loved him, not surrounded by machines that were keeping him alive but not living.
I influenced that decision.
And then, with my own hands, I removed the ventilator.
He died the next day.