Plywood

She bursts into the room, into the world. I look at her face, and she’s complacent at last, resigned to the possibility of the worst being true. Of course he’s dead. He has been dead for hours, but I haven’t told her, and I don’t know if I can now. It isn’t cold, but I shiver.

She's nineteen. I know this with a certainty inexplicable. She stops in front of me to ask the question she knows she is expected to ask, and I cannot provide an answer. Like all doctors surely have, I begin to reassure first, as much for myself as for her.

“We have made sure to the best of our ability that he has not suffered.” Hollow words. Both of us know the road down which I am heading, my voice paving the way before with smooth stones. “I’m sorry.”

We hover for a little then, as always happens in this situation. I have known many different reactions to ill news. Some descend into barefaced grief; others assume a stolid, courageous face. She does neither, and we continue to hover as if I had not told her anything.

I too abandon my role, which would probably entail a gentle touch to the shoulder and a quiet exit. Instead, I stand before her, the two of us locked in time. It is then that the room fills with light, and I begin to observe a strangeness about her, as if she were elsewhere. It is then that another story begins.

If only waste was never necessary.