Thoughts after 1000 deaths
This is the talk given by Dr. Paul Burns at Decoration in May 2009.
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And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death. (Revelation 6:8)
In the mystery of life, we are surrounded by the mystery of death. Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death. The uniqueness of each individual extends even to the way we die. Each death is as distinctive as the singular face we each show the world during the days of our life. Each man and every woman dies in their own way.
Death has always been a part of life and when the first person was buried here at Heflin, it was close and hard. A child in a wagon gets sick and its life is torn from its mother’s grasp. The family stops to bury the child here at Heflin, then moves on. The mother cries at first aloud, then silently for months, as nothing she did seemed to help, and the baby just died, and the mother silently asked herself over and over why she came to this land. There was no time for self-indulgent mourning, but I think a deep and profound depression was likely there; the family had to survive.
A century-plus later, so much around death has changed. We could now have likely saved that baby if it had made it to the ER in time. Nevertheless, when the spirit leaves the body, nothing has every changed.
Thirty-seven years in medicine, and I have seen a thousand deaths and sometimes I think I am more confused then when I say my first death. I am no expert, for we are all amateurs with death.
This is my 70th year of coming to Heflin. The first was May 7, 1939, when I came as a seven-month-old infant. Even as a child, I was disappointed when the talk at Heflin was not appropriate. I always wanted it to be about Heflin, and not just a sermon like the other 51 sermons of the year. Therefore, when the scheduled speaker could not come, Pierce asked me, and I said yes, and it will be appropriate: it will be about death.
In a lifetime of medicine, and as a soldier in Vietnam, what have I learned or observed about death that might be helpful? Thirty-seven years helping patients and families face death all the while trying to understand it myself. Then Vietnam, when it was I who faced death. A lifetime and what do I make of all this?
It has been 43 years since I returned from Vietnam and I am still sorting it all out in my mind. Churchill said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
I would add that the exhilaration does not last long, but he memory remains. What did I learn about death in Vietnam? I have learned that it is best not to talk about Vietnam. Therefore, I have chosen two events that happened to me that illustrate something about my own mortality. Let me tell you two stories and how my life changed and neither did I have any control over.
The troop ship with 5,000 replacements for the First Air Cavalry and our small company left San Diego for a month at sea. The morning before we landed, the commander called all 5,000 men to the deck at 1000 hours. A thousand on the deck and 4,000 on every piece of steel where we could find room. The day before we landed, a simple and riveting event changed 5,000 lives. The commanding officer ordered us all on deck. Into the bullhorn he simply said, “Gentlemen, today will be spent issuing weapons and getting ammunition ready for tomorrow.” He gave us a very short schedule of events. He then did something I will never forget, and in five minutes that experienced commander changed the lives and sobered the minds of 5,000 young men. He turned to the lieutenant standing beside him and said simply, “Lieutenant.” The lieutenant, in a crystal clear tenor voice, sang a mournfully slow “Danny Boy,” the Irish ballad of war, and death, and being brought back to his mother’s land. In five minutes, 5,000 men were very silent. No longer a grand adventure, a war in an exotic land, but for many this was to be a premature rendezvous with death, and for the rest, life would change and not for the better and none of the 5,000 one which would be their fate.
When the lieutenant finished, the commander simply said, “Good luck, men.” At 2 a.m. we got up, at 3 a.m., the landing craft came alongside, at 4 a.m., we began going over the side, and at daylight, we waded ashore. I cannot describe what I think when I hear “Danny Boy” today, but I would like it sung here at Heflin when I am buried.
Dr Paul Burns. c.1966, arriving for sick call at a Catholic school in a jungle near Bien Hoa, Vietnam
A year later, I flew to Pleiku, the base of the First Air Cavalry, to leave Vietnam and come home. Now, one last ride and I was out. We had been told the plane would come in low over the trees at the end of the runway, and the cargo door would lower as it hit the runway, but the engines would be kept screaming, the brakes holding it stopped but with the whole plane shaking and straining. You had only a minute or two before the chance for the mortars and rockets to come in. The major said wryly, “We do not like to lose planes on the runway.” One hundred and fifty replacements ran off, with the jet engines straining and the dust blinding. We sprinted as hard as we could to the open cargo door, passing the new replacements as they ran off the plane. As the last boot lifted off the red Pleiku dirt and hit the ramp, the pilot released the brakes with the motors already at full throttle and the cargo door began to close as we started down the runway. We still had not made it past the rockets. The pilot put the plane into the steepest climb possible and we spiraled above the runway, gaining altitude before he dared head over the jungle to the South China Sea.
The possibility of death was the same as it had been for a year. Then, as we finally leveled out, we all knew had made it, and a yell went up and a marvelous thing happened to me that was totally unexpected. When you are in war, someone is trying to kill you every second of every day. I honestly did not feel the strain until that plane leveled out and I was going home. It was like lifting a curtain, slowly over an hour or so and I realized no one was trying to kill me now.
Forty years later, I still dream of Vietnam.
Vietnam to me is similar to something in each of your lives. Something terrible you have no control over, and you are never the same.
The world loves closure; loves a think that, as they say, can be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to that loss is forever, that four decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continual presence of some loss, some horrible event. Closure, closure, we hear it all the time and yet we all know for some losses, there is no closure. There is silence. The silence is second nature, the loss may be decades old but it is still as raw as a freshly dug grave to you. It may be misunderstood if you try to explain it to someone, so it is best to never talk about it.
Thirty-seven years in medicine and because of the nature of my practice, I saw a lot of people die. I admit I hated death. Maybe it was because I was trained in the Ben Taub ER in Houston, and for three months I was in charge of the largest and best emergency room on the planet. The senior staff told us there was no excuse for a death in the Ben Taub ER. No matter how devastating the injury, if the patient died it was our fault, pure and simple and we believed it. Therefore, no one in the world was better at saving lives than we were. There were no excuses: if you made an error of judgement you were out. It was life changing because, if you made it through, you had confidence, and you knew you could handle anything because you had proven it 24 hours at a time.
