The slow beeping of the monitor comes to a halt and someone eventually shuts it off.

Click clack.

The machines are quiet now. I take one more look at the innocent, boyish young face and wonder what kind of life he had led. I leave the room, along with the rest of the team. A hand draws the curtain closed.

Death.

Quite literally, the most final force on Earth. The permanent, irreversible cessation of biological function. An end so absolute it defies our understanding. We shield ourselves from it, speak of it in hushed tones, and pretend it’s always far away.

But then, it arrives. Sometimes without warning. A person is there—breathing, thinking, speaking—and then they are not. Their life force disappears, leaving behind a quiet, unsettling stillness. In those moments, everything else loses meaning. The noise of daily life fades. The petty stresses and distractions suddenly feel irrelevant.

After a death, we walk away. Silently. As a team, yet alone. A hodgepodge of white coats and scrubs. The room behind us goes still. The machines are quiet, the lines disconnected. And we do what we are trained to do: We sit down. We log in. We order more labs. We begin to type.

Click. clack.

The only sound in the workroom is the click-clack of keyboards—hollow, mechanical. No one says much. We bury ourselves in tasks: ordering the next set of labs, writing progress notes, reviewing vitals. But our thoughts are not in the present. Our minds remain in that room. We’re each processing what just happened—what we just witnessed—but without the ability to say so.

Sitting at the computer becomes a strange kind of comfort—a familiar refuge when everything else feels too raw, too overwhelming. We retreat to what we know best: the work. The routine. The blinking cursor.

Click clack.

It is a way to hold ourselves together, to keep moving when words fail us.

There’s a strange kind of collective dissociation. A quiet grief, mixed with guilt. We’re struggling with the sense that jumping back into our routines feels soulless, robotic. As if we’re disrespecting the magnitude of what just occurred. And yet… we also know we must keep going. There are other patients waiting. Other lives depending on us.

We must move on.

Yet we must not.

It is the paradox of our jobs, the collision of sacred and mundane. Of profound loss and the inability to stop and process it. To feel both heartbreak and responsibility at once. The paradox of yearning to be deeply human and respect the loss of life, while running to perform relentlessly mechanical tasks in the aftermath of something as profound as death. And to carry on not because we are numb—but because we still care. To carry on because perhaps, deep down, we recognize that the only way to prevent more death is to keep going—to order the next labs, update the notes, check the vitals.

Click clack.

The mundane is not a betrayal of the moment we just witnessed—it is the very thing that might spare someone else from the same fate.

So even in the quiet click-clack of keyboards, in the digital routines that fill the empty spaces, there is care. There is grief. There is humanity. And there is life.

Click clack.

Aaron Grubner is a pediatric emergency medicine physician.