The speaker in Jennifer Stella’s poem “First Page” (Spring 2019 Intima) pleads with a patient not to die, not tonight, while “I am in charge of you not dying.” Stella writes of a physician on night service in an overcrowded unit, expecting, a code to be called, yet hoping it won’t be. My own poem “Haglund’s Deformity” (Spring 2020 Intima) also hopes to forestall death. The speaker is kept awake by a middle of the night awareness of mortality: Death won’t come tonight, but it will come.

Stella’s speaker is running from patient to patient, hoping to catch some sleep in the call room; for my speaker it is only the mind that is running, keeping her awake. In Stella’s poem, arms may be used to crack ribs during an attempt at cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In my poem, the speaker desires envelopment in other human arms, the touch of warm skin reminding her that she is, for now, alive. Running and holding, both life-giving, yet differently.

I feel an affinity between these texts, pleading against inevitable ends.

Right now these poems also feel like relics from the past. Death is not something distant and abstract. We are all holding vigil, for those sick or dying from the Coronavirus, for George Floyd and all those killed at the hands of police whose mandate is to protect.

I read Stella’s lovely poem, reflect on mine, and see the privilege of putting death off for another day.

My friend Red was scheduled to die on August 4th. He is incarcerated on Tennessee’s Death Row, where I have volunteered for the last five years. Earlier this year I worried about how I would say goodbye, knowing that unless the court grants a stay, or Governor Lee grants clemency, my goodbye would be final.

Instead, I walked out of prison class one evening in February, with hugs and see-you-next-weeks, not knowing everything was about to change, and I wouldn’t be able to go back.

Just two and a half weeks before his scheduled execution, Bill Lee, the Governor of Tennessee, issued a temporary reprieve through the end of 2020 due to the “challenges and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.” At a time when millions of people are falling sick and hundreds of thousands are dying, the virus has temporarily extended Red’s life.

Nowadays I am holding vigil differently, less inwardly than my poem’s speaker. Yes, death is inevitable, but in so many instances, with better public health, policing, and policy, it would be avoidable – at least for now.

Elizabeth Lanphier is a social and political philosopher and medical ethicist. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University, an MS degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and was an Ethics Fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Professor Lanphier served as an editor on the Intima editorial board. She joins the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Ethics Center faculty in 2020.