The First Daffodils of Spring: Confirming Death as an FY1

When faced with death one enters this mental space of uninhabited neutrality; Perhaps it’s a form of protection or perhaps it’s the un-naturality of it. Perhaps the absence of movement, the silence of motion causes us to retreat. No rise and fall, no twitching, no tensing, no flaring, no fluttering, no pulsation, no personality, no mannerisms. A complete dampening of autonomic amplitude. We rarely notice these minutiae of animation daily but find their absence unsettling.

But however deep we withdraw, however thick the coat we surround ourselves with, the softest most gentle parts of us always find a way to squeeze their way out. We find ourselves making small offerings. Offerings that we know are futile but somehow seem of the greatest importance: closing of the eyes, straightening the bed, tucking them in.

They are ashen and mottled blue, so we try to forge a hearth deep in the snow. We try to extend our warmth, but they are too far beneath the ice. Their glassy expression too distant and too thick to fathom.

So, we settle for blankets and silent blessings and listen to the stillness. Five minutes seems arbitrary, when the silence of death is so vast. It warps your perception of time. But still we count. There is something ritualistic about the way one confirms a death. The order, the timing, the precision.

…

Hector was no stranger to it. As the most junior doctor on the elderly care ward, it often fell to him. A registrar had once talked of it as an honour, being this arbiter of finality. The one who stops the clock. But Hector did not feel proud, or prestigious in this moment. He was not filled with light or gold or importance. He felt small, and grey, and numb. As if he were this fly on the wall. As if he were a pestilence. As if he had, instead, started the clock on decay.

He noted the time and the date. 06:37, 26th September 2024 and signed his name, before languidly looking out the window. Even the time, in its ugly randomness, lacked compassion, he thought.

The morning mist was breaking like waves over the flatness of the muddily tilled fields. Its somnolent smog sapping any speck of colour. It all felt grey. He was in that end-of-night-shift stupor. His thoughts were muted and monotone. A dry insipid taste clung to his mouth, he was parched, famished and his senses were sterile. It all felt grey. If only there were a medication he could take to add colour, a ‘tincture’ perhaps. The nuance of the word pleased him, and he smiled, briefly.

A soft but sharp voice pierced the drab, off-blue, ward-bay curtain. “Doctor Hector… Doctor Hector have you finished?”.

Hector paused, gave one last vacant glance of solemnity, steadied himself with a breath, and turned. He pulled the curtain, his movement felt clumsy next to such stifling stillness. “Yes AJ, can I help?”

He did not like calling people by their roles, it seemed too distant.

“Yes Doctor, it’s just that we need side room 11’s Pre-emptive medication prescribed… and they are due to be discharged later this morning”

AJ was slight, but her tenderness in stature and manner, belied a steely resolve. Hector liked this about her

“Of course, AJ, let me just call this patients family and I’ll get right to it”

AJ’s expression softened “Are you ok doctor?” she said gently placing a hand on the curve of his shoulder.

“I’m ok” Perhaps he’d feel comforted if he wasn’t so dulled.

AJ nodded, gave a warm half-smile and turned.

“Thank you”, He added, wishing the interaction would continue; not for any hope of connection, but rather of reluctance for the next.

…

He broke the news as trained, with warning, with delicate, deliberate pauses, and neutral empathy. The son cried unattractively down the phone. Hector didn’t know what he felt, for he didn’t let it surface.

…

Pre-emptive medication are those used to give comfort for people in their last stages of life. For him their names were familiar, like those of old school friends; but he wondered if a name like Mirtazapine, in its sophisticated foreignness, created solace in those that are strangers. At least they know Morphine, he thought, everyone knows morphine. Perhaps that’s why it is prescribed first on the yellow chart.

Before starting on the elderly care ward,  Hector’s found yellow a warm colour, one of hope and serenity. One that sang Coldplay and smelt like fresh lemons. It was his lucky colour. 

The first daffodils of spring now came gently, with a subtle melancholy and a scent of mercy.

He strode down the ward, unaffected by the various bleeps and buzzes of drips and monitors. He knew too well how emergency wailed.  There was a particular walk-in cupboard unintentionally hidden at the far end of the ward, where all the various folios, forms and files were kept. They were all meticulously organised; each specialist chart and table having their own hue.

It was unnecessarily colourful. Hector liked this. He’d often come to this cupboard on days such as today, where everything seemed a bit cheerless. The cupboard was mundane in a magical way, as most things are.

It smelt of fresh print and new books, and drew him to the fantasy of another life where he had chosen the arts over science. He’d pretend to be looking for a particular piece of paperwork and close himself in. But he was familiar, he just craved the respite, the solitude. Just him and his technicolour transcripts.

Today it seemed especially luminous, he flinched as his eyes adjusted, as if seeing a classic film remastered to colour for the first time.  Perhaps it was the sudden transition from discordant dullness to vibrant tranquillity, but there was definitely something more vivid, more emergent, that he just couldn’t place. That ineffable quality that only the boldest colours possess.

Hector closed his eyes, allowing himself a moment to soak in the lull. He let his mind swim, and it pulsed with a gaudy swell of undefined shapes and colours. It was as if the brilliance of the room had seeped a Kandinsky onto the backs of eyelids. He drew in and painted his lungs, a Monet, each bronchiole a Water lily. And as the less cultured tune he’d blasted on his commute, echoed in the halls of his mind, he felt the spool in his shoulder unwind, and the taught tapestry on his back unravel.

With a defiant exhalation he reached out his hand, to the shelf where he knew the yellow prescription chart would be.

His hand caught nothing but air. He staggered, disorientated. Perhaps in his release he had stepped back unknowingly. He opened his eyes to quell the confusion, but the undulating colours did not fall away to organised stacks of paper, rather they rippled with searing light, a piercing yellow. The room span and he was caught in a tempest of blinding luminance; he tried to fix a point but watched it streak away into blurred lines.  He shielded his eyes. Yellow? So much yellow? He tried to sit, to quell the nausea that was rising, but felt no cold floor. Was he falling? Hector flailed, his hands grasping for something familiar, he found nothing.  

His body felt heavy, and a violent energy rose within.

The vomit bloomed from him like the first daffodils of spring and as the darkness consumed him, he thought of Levomepromazine and mercy.

Dr Harry Baggott

F1, Trent Foundation School

September 2025

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