Warm Death

• Ashleigh Dowling, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2016

I stand beside her bed. Grace's body looks small and out of place caught between the taut sheets, a tube feeding down her throat. A machine lives for her now, keeping the husk of my little sister alive. I tuck her teddy bear in beside her shoulder, reaching under the covers and clasping her hand in mine. I uncurl her warm fingers, holding them to my cheeks and drinking in their warmth. The warmth of life. I trace her blisters from playing on the monkey bars. I remembered how proud she was to show me how she could swing across the whole row in the school playground. She's still trying to master the triangles.

I caress her fingers, seeing the hands of the five-year-old I held each day as I walked her to school. Gently I wrap her fingers around her bear's torso. It was given to her on the day she was born.

Tears pool in my eyes. I see my mother, lingering in the doorway. Waiting on the threshold of insanity through grief. Her eyes are wide and anxious. She has left this task to me.

It was raining. Heavy sheets of sleet buffeted the windscreen, as the windscreen wipers worked so violently I thought that they would snap off. I felt trapped and blind, caged inside a car with the windows obscured by thick curtains of rain, my mother squinting through the rapidly shrinking window of vision through the windscreen.
Then I was thrust forward, jarring pain shooting through every limb, and I was holding my breath. I didn't think of anyone else until I was safely extricated from the car and then I saw Grace lying on a backboard and my knees collapsed beneath me.
'Is she alive?' I demanded.
'She's got a pulse,' someone answered.
And with a surge of relief, I knew that however injured she was, Grace would live. What faith I had in our doctors.

'She's brain dead,' the doctor told us that evening.
'What does that mean?' I yelled. 'Can't you fix her?'
'She's lost brain function. There's nothing we can do. She's on life support now.'

I tuck Grace in tightly, fastidiously neatening her sheets and blankets. Reaching under the covers, I place one hand on her chest and the other on my own, and synchronise our breathing, the continuous rise and fall of our chests. I will breathe for both of us when her breathing fails.
I turn off her respirator, barely aware of my tears, feeling her chest rise and fall... rise and fall... then stop, and feeling my chest stop as well, waiting for her to breathe before I can take another breath. I stand still and numb, not breathing, not thinking, not feeling. Then I place both my hands on her heart and cry and cry as I feel her heartbeat fade away... a final decrescendo to her life.