The Path To God

A Measure Of Salvation

I will never forget the first death I had ever encountered with my own eyes.

It was somewhere around 8:00 - 8:30 AM. I had come into work for the morning shift, which I very rarely ever work.

I was in a patient’s room with my doctor. Suddenly you hear the thrashing of papers and creaking of chairs as a surge of nurses shot straight up and ran into a room on the other side of the ER.

My doctor and I rushed over to see what was happening.

In the room, occupied by at least ten nurses, was this six month old Asian baby who was not breathing. She lay there on the bed, while one of the ER Techs was giving her chest compressions with his fingers. My doctor went over behind the baby with a suction and started getting a lot of productive spew that was residing in the baby’s trachea. Some of it was blood.

In the span of all this time, the parents were sitting patiently outside the room, talking to nurses and asking questions. I reluctantly pushed myself to go talk to them to get as much information as I could about what had happened. Talking to parents with a baby in the ER is never an easy thing.

Simply put, the mother stated that the baby had developed a fever for the past couple of days. They took her to their primary doctor just yesterday to have her checked up. It turns out all the blood tests and radiology came back negative, and they were told that the baby had a viral infection and maybe some respiratory problems that the family would have to follow up with a therapist for.

Later that night, the parents said the baby was having a hard time breathing. They could hear some rough noises coming through, as if she was struggling to breathe. A few hours later early in the morning, they found that the baby had some dark brown vomit coming up. This was blood.

They instantly took her in the car and started driving to the ER. However en route, the baby started turning blue, she wasn’t breathing. The mother was in the backseat giving CPR by herself, while the father continued to drive to the ER.

This is how they ended up with us. Back in the room, nurses continued to give shots of epinephrine, hoping that a pulse would come back.

Nearly an hour later, after blood work and portable chest x-rays we could still not determine what had happened, the baby was still unresponsive. It was at this point that the doctor had to call it.

Looking at the X-rays, it was easy to see that one of the baby’s lungs was almost completely collapsed. The trachea was shifted out of place so much so that it is no wonder the baby could barely breathe. Because of all this, the baby’s heart itself was also out of place, shifting much more towards the right than a normal heart. What could have caused this, even my doctor had no idea. A chest x-ray and blood work that comes back negative a day before and then completely opposite the next day is almost improbable.

It is a wonder what God holds in store for us each and every day. Subtle things, things you would not give a second thought become those that you remember for the rest of your life.

Such a subtle moment occurred when I decided to walk back into the room at that very moment. Had I waited only a minute more, I would have never heard what ensued in that room. Because of that moment, the contents of this posting would have been different, my thoughts on the event would have been different.

Because I walked back into that room at the exact time it was written that I would, I was next to the doctor when she informed the father that they had done all they could, and after an hour the chances of survival were almost non-existent. It was hard to say, but the baby had passed.

It is difficult to write this next part because of the sheer outburst of emotion that was withheld in these few seconds. Immediately after my doctor informed the father of what happened, he broke down.

You will never hear a cry of despair so vivid, so emotional, that it drives the life out of you like the one you hear of a parent who has lost their child. You will never hear anything remotely close, whether in TV shows or movies. It is unimaginable, indescribable. Words cannot give meaning to the emotions that ran through me when I heard him cry out.

I stood there, almost lifeless.

I watched as the father bent down next to his six month old daughter, free of wires and cords, her eyes open, staring into nothingness. He put his hand on her forehead and caressed her, repeating “I’m sorry” over and over, yelling it so loud so that maybe she may hear him, choking on his words with tears. There have been times in the past, I am told, that a father in the same situation as this one started to give CPR to his own child, after being told there was nothing else to be done. It is not surprising that everyone in the room had tears in their eyes.

It’s in times like these you understand what it means to be human. What it means to have a soul, feeling, emotion. In that moment, there was no difference between any one of us, no prejudice to distinguish us from others. In that room we were all family. The child lying on the bed was our child.

Time froze in place. I became desensitized to anything else that was happening around me. Nothing really mattered as much anymore.

It’s a chilling feeling, knowing that the Angel of Death can be in the same room as you. Walking out of there was one of the most heart-wrenching things I’ve ever done. I walked past the mother, who was being consoled by a nurse as she was also in tears, able to hear her husband yelling from inside the room, even though it was closed shut.

Death comes to everyone, young or old. It doesn’t matter what race you are, what ethnicity, what color. We will all die one day, and we are all dying slowly, as time passes.

Just as this infant, our deaths will be no different. They might be in different locations, different times, different settings, but the end result is always the same.

From the hadith of the Prophet (S), we know that children who die in a state of infancy instantly have their souls transferred to Paradise, and in this case, I am happy for the little girl who’s soul I saw taken that day. I hope her parents are well and hope their child intercedes for them on the Day of Judgment.

It was narrated that Abu Hassaan said: I said to Abu Hurayrah: Two of my sons have died. Can you narrate to me any hadith from the Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) which will console us for our loss? He said: Yes: “Their little ones are the little ones (da’aamees) of Paradise. When one of them meets his father – or his parents – he takes hold of his garment – or his hand – as I am taking told of the hem of your garment, and he does not let go until Allah admits him and his father to Paradise.”

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