The Line We Shouldn’t Cross
“When we fail to let the dying die, we harm the living in us all.”
— Unknown
There’s a man I can’t stop thinking about. He returned to our ICU again and again for a month, not because he was getting better, but because we couldn’t let him die. His only request was simple and human: “I want to go home and see my dogs.” He never got to.
Instead, his body became part of the system, a system that often values procedures over peace, intervention over mercy. His wife, struggling to accept his decline, refused comfort care. She didn’t want to hear the word “dying.” She only wanted to hear “positive things.” So, we kept his body alive while his soul slipped further away.
On the day he returned, barely conscious and breathing like a fish out of water, I was assigned to his care. The team began planning for another central line, pressors, fluids, all the things we do when we pretend we can still fix what’s already terminally broken.
And I froze. I didn’t want to place the line. I didn’t want to cause another moment of pain. I didn’t want to be complicit in cruelty disguised as care.
This wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t fatigue. It was moral injury, the quiet trauma that occurs when we as providers are repeatedly asked to act against our most profound understanding of what is right.
Mercifully, the man’s wife came in that morning. With the help of a compassionate nurse, she finally agreed to comfort care. He received a small dose of morphine, and just like that, he died. The morphine didn’t kill him; it just relieved his pain enough that he relaxed and let his body do what it needed. No central line. No compressions. Just peace.
I write this not to assign blame, but to bear witness, to him and all of us. Moral injury is not about failure; it’s about staying true to the truth we hold inside. The truth is this: I can’t keep crossing that line. There is a point at which care turns into harm, where medicine becomes a performance, where the healer becomes the wounded.
I have been to that place and I don’t want to go back.