"It doesn't matter."

We had a fairly routine call about a month ago, but something about it continues to haunt me. I hesitate to recount this because it appears to fall into a formula that has crept into American writing in the last few decades. The formula is story + judgment = control over reality. I'm not interested in that formula. Really. I'm interested only in understanding the event and exhaling thereby a kind of understanding for everyone involved.

We took somebody to the hospital who needed to go but who was not in any imminent danger. With no overwhelming feelings to process and with coffee in hand, I went to tend to my duties. My first job is to re-make the stretcher. As I was doing this, I couldn't help but hear a young woman talking on her cell phone. She was saying to somebody, "I've got another patient to move, so I'll call you back." She snapped the cell phone shut and left. I finished with the gurney and took it outside to load it into the ambulance.

My next job was to make sure the rig was clean and ready for the next patient. Today it was easy. The crew had been unusually neat, so after loading the gurney there was nothing for me to do but wait for the rest of them to finish filling out paperwork and come out so we could go back to Charlotte. I leaned on the back of our ambulance and sipped my coffee. Near me another crew pulled up and discharged a patient--apparently another routine situation--and after several minutes some crew members from another town came out, talking and laughing. I sat quietly and waited, just watching the people and chilling out. It was hot on the tarmac, but I was in the shade. Traffic sounds echoed from around the corner of the hospital.

A few minutes later, the young cell-phone woman came out, with a stretcher and another crew member from her squad. On the stretcher was a very old, very frail woman, who was wailing sort of under her breath, pushing the sounds out against some kind of inner resistance, as some people do when they are unconscious and uncomfortable. Her back and neck were arched so that she was looking straight up into the sky, through closed lids. Her knees were raised--she almost looked like someone who had been fastened to heaven by her knees and chest and was about to be hoisted up, or was trying to call somebody to hoist her up. Her knees and her arms were bare--and so was the area between her legs. I could see that somebody had put a pad on her.

Sometimes moments freeze, almost like you have found yourself in the landscape of a painting. All the colors become more vivid, and time seems to stop, and your heart and mind seem to move around in the surreal landscape without any attachment to time. I experienced that just then, and in the frozen painting around me I could see the tarmac, and the white sheets, and the pale parchment tan of the woman's skin, and the vivid red of the ambulance, and I felt a kind of shock at the total incongruity of this frail holy figure placed as she was. I couldn't bear it.

As I moved forward, time began again. I walked over to the stretcher and gathered a blanket that looked like it might have been put there with some thought of covering her. I shook it free. The cell phone woman and her companion did not stop the stretcher, so I walked along beside them and awkwardly placed the blanket over the woman's legs and hips. She never stopped moaning and she never moved. The cell phone woman looked at me. "It doesn't matter," she said.

Now, don't get offended. It is as easy to pass judgement on that young woman as it is to know that it is wrong to cause the elderly helpless ones among us to suffer indignities. You haven't walked a mile in the cell phone woman's shoes and neither have I. For all I know, she could be absolutely right that it doesn't matter whether we see an old dying woman's diaper on the tarmac with traffic going by. For all I know, the human spirit has just so much coinage, and hers was spent on far more significant and important activities than mine was at that moment. I had something to give just then. At other times, I haven't.

But I blushed, and turned back to my own ambulance. I had to do it. I had to fix that blanket because although it didn't matter to the old dying woman, it mattered terribly to me. I don't want the world around me to ignore indignities. Life becomes so much more meaningless when "it doesn't matter." I want it to matter. Maybe it doesn't. But I want it to.