Death.

I have always seen patients at the end of their lives at the hospital.

I have never seen the 'after'. Aftermath. How the grieving family deals with it. How the funeral is. What is after.

The end is final. Sometimes we can already guess. My daily job is to break bad news. Every day, there is always at least 1 bad news.

Your family member is dying.

He/she may most possibly not survive.

No matter how they beg me to help, I am helpless.

I am not God. I am not the answer to your hopes and prayers. I am trying as best as I can.

The is always a limit to what we, at the hospital, can do for your loved ones.

We are not heartless. The end is always final. It is always sad. No matter how hard we try to prolong it, no matter how we try to ease the end, it always comes.

Death is a promise. It is one thing that is one truth we have to understand and embrace. Young or old.

It is not that I do not want to see the aftermath. I just cannot. I have to move on. If you see the same thing I do, day in and day out, if we do not develop a mechanism to make it bearable, we will not survive. So we survive. Each in our own way.

If you see us discussing deaths so cavalierly, it is not that we do not have any empathy nor we disregard any life. No. We just have to make it as it is. For us to function.

But trust me, there are days some faces haunted us. Some stories. Some family members. Some words. Some little things like a smile, a hand who held yours, a touch, a word. We will live with that. We have to.