4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Staying for the Stillness
Jerome Smith has been avoiding the ringtail possum in enclosure ICU-7 all day. Three weeks of care, three weeks of small improvements that reversed into seizures and decline, and now Dr. Groves is ready to have the conversation Jerome already knows the shape of. The tests confirm what the chart has been whispering: the damage is progressive, irreversible, and the only kindness left is the one that ends things. Jerome chooses to stay — to hold Pip through the quiet, unheroic work of letting go.
The midday lull finds Jerome where he's been avoiding all morning — in front of Pip's enclosure, watching a ringtail possum who no longer watches back. Three weeks of care have narrowed to this: declining food intake, worsening seizures, a body retreating from a brain that can no longer hold it together. Dr. Groves arrives with test results that close the last door. The neurological damage is progressive. There is nothing left to try that wouldn't simply manage the dying.
Jerome agrees to euthanasia and chooses to be present. He holds Pip through the sedation, speaks to her as she slips under, and feels the heartbeat stop beneath his palm. The grief breaks through the compartments he's built — not just for Pip, but for Nate in the bathroom, for Luke pushed to the margins, for every kind of damage that accumulates beyond repair. Dr. Groves doesn't rush him, doesn't soften it, just names the truth: it doesn't get easier, but you learn to carry it. Jerome walks out into the winter light and stands at the boundary fence, watching kangaroos who made it, letting the loss settle into something he can hold.
