'Why am I dead?' He never asked. Here's the answer he never heard

A medical student in residency sees many things — some that thrill, some that horrify. Shara Yurkiewicz records these observations faithfully, with eyes that blur the line between patient and doctor. In this note to a man who has recently died, she reflects poignantly on a surgery suddenly gone wrong, chronicling what happens when a patient dies on the operating table. It is an event so rare that her more experienced colleagues have seen it twice in eight years, or once in 15 — but Shara knows only this eighty-year-old patient, for whom this one moment was all that mattered.