Erasers

Eradere paginam (Erase the page)

This is the type that most people are familiar with. You rub it against paper and what was written disappears, the grooves on paper a faint reminder of where the pencil once was.

Eradere ut vivere (Erase so as to live)

“I want to live,” she wrote with a feeble hand. So machines hummed on to keep her alive, and she was saved. But today, a few years later, she talks of wanting death, maybe a car running over her as she scooters across the street going from one doctor’s appointment to another. Would she regret being saved? Would she still smile, as the afternoon sun peeked at rainy Vancouver?

Noli eradere (Don’t erase)

44 yo female with MS, I glanced at her chart. I asked about her history, medications, surgeries, hospitalization, allergies. But mostly she digressed and told me about her marriage, divorce, daughters. “44-year-old female with MS,” her friend had suggested she include on her dating profile. “Is that who I am?”

Eradere ut oblivisci (Erase so as to forget)

The search for a cure. Antidepressants, painkillers, surgical removal of a breast. To correct abnormalities — too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, teeth uneven; too many standard deviations from the mean.

Image courtesy of © 2013 Thinkstock

Eradere ut medicare (Erase so as to heal)

White walls of hospitals: a quiet end, a new beginning. The surgeons cut deeper and deeper and there: his shuddering heart. They rerouted his blood to machines, and I ducked as the first pulse of blood ejected high from the open aorta. They scraped out his calcified valve, sewed in a synthetic one, put the heart back in action, wired together the ribs, and stitched up the skin. After three months, perhaps all that remains of this episode would be the faint squiggly lines of the stitches.

Eradere ut abire (Erase so as to leave)

A swallowed yawn, or silence that shrouds the rest of the sentence into