Excerpt from Nursing and Becoming:

Putting aside all romance and sentimentality, the heart is a glorified mechanical pump. A simple pump. It pumps blood to the body’s various organs, including itself, and when it can no longer pump, a person dies. With medical interventions we can essentially pump blood for the heart—with CPR, or an ECMO machine.

We can delay the end…but for what purpose? Death is a part of life. We all die. The Buddhist view is that our attachment to life, our inability to accept the fact that we all will die, is the cause of much suffering.

Attachment is the only root cause of all our suffering. Even if our attachment is as small as the tip of a needle, it can still cause us unending distress. No matter what you are attached to, once you get it, you are afraid of losing it; once you do lose it, your heart is broken. If there were no attachment, then what suffering would you have? 

—The Diamond Cutter Sutra, translated by Khenpo Sodargye

I really wish that patients’ families could appreciate that sometimes the most compassionate thing to do is withdraw care. Withdrawing care is not a negative reflection of your love. It does not mean that you don’t love them, or that you have given up on them. It is, in fact, The Greatest Act of Love—that you can let your loved one go peacefully, let their suffering cease—because your attachment to their existence should not eclipse a very ill person’s right to die naturally and end their suffering.

Even before this week, his heart had to be restarted six times in a single day when it changed to a fatal rhythm. 

Oh his heart, his poor heart, that pump, that mechanical wonder. It had been through so much…

To be honest I was already exhausted after my sprint to the pharmacy. And then came the chest compressions: I can’t remember how many turns I took. In the end I was inside his bed, on my knees, pushing down on his chest, trying to get the best angle to compress effectively without throwing out my back. Sasha, that big bear of a man, blood was coming out of his mouth. Blood was coming out of his breathing tube. The respiratory therapist was bagging him, forcing 100% oxygen into his lungs with an Ambu bag. I, myself, could hardly breathe...

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