Intensive Care is purgatory, the waiting room for death, a never ending Judgement Day.  Five beds crammed into one room for people who show up unscheduled.  Three lined up from corner to corner along the wall across from the door, one to the right of the door beyond the hand washing station, and my father in the space just to the left. The dialysis machine and repirator take up the space between the bed and the wall. Computer carts skitter across the middle space, as nurses pilot around them.

Most of the patients await new livers, their jaundiced coloring an unreal spectrum of yellow and orange. The creamy wall might seem cheery and warm in your home, but under the flourescent lights turns the whole room sickly.  An arrhythmic pattern of alarming beeps and buzzes, white noise to the staff, keep patients and visitors alike unnerved. No windows. No day. No night.

The bodies on the beds are machines. Plugged in, monitored, recipients of the best surgical care in the country, indeed in the world. The people in the bodies, what do they feel? Trapped? Unable to escape because the very vessel of escape has malfunctioned. My father cannot access the words in his head and marshal them into a sentence. With the repirator tube, he cannot even make known those words he can reach. His eyes, swimming up to the surface of consciousness, beg for mercy. Any releif. To scratch his nose where tape holding the feeding tubes has irritated his skin. To scratch his feet, so far down and dry. To loosen the compression balloons on his legs. To take out these tubes, my god please take out these goddamn tubes. To unrestrain his hands to do these things himself.

Nothing can distract him. Nothing on his body feels pleasant so he cannot focus on anything. His existence has reduced to pain, irritation, and frustration. His agitations feeds itself. He has no external stimuli to distract him. No pleasant music, nothing of visual interest.

Visitors are there to reassure him, to talk with him, to distract him, only irritate him further because they can do nothing. They — we — ask him questions he cannot answer. We don’t understand what he is trying to say. We annoy the staff in our ignorance. He cannot relax. His blood pressure goes higher. We worry.

Around us, are others. The body is a thing that houses a person. When it fails, the person slips away. An ICU is there to bring that person back, to keep that person with us by repairing the worst damage to the body; but I can’t say I blame the person in that body if he wishes he could slip away, the other way, which might seem so much easier when that option is so close.

Don’t give up, I beg him. Don’t. Your father lived into his 90s, so you could have a good 15 to 20 years. I beg him for me, for every one who loves him. For him? That I hold at at distance. I don’t want to know his answer because I’m too weak to let him go. Not this way. Not here, not like this.