Advance Directives

Varun U. Shetty

I don’t know what I would want if my fingers ever curled up like a
scared centipede, my legs remained frozen at 45 degrees, and my butt
cheeks opened into oozing layers of pain, or if I were ever tied down,
breathing through a tube, reminding myself to breathe through my
mouth, telling myself that it’s like snorkeling, and realizing it’s nothing
like snorkeling. You want me to give you simple, actionable directives,
like ‘pull the plug’ or ‘let me fight,’  but I want you to see me the way
you see me across the room when an inflection of my eyebrow tells
you that I think you’re full of shit, and that makes you laugh. Maybe
count the number of plastic tubes entering me? Shall we say it’s bad if
it’s more than four? When I die, let my body be useful like the Parsis.
Feed me to the extinct vultures, or donate me to medicine, where a
student considers naming this body before taking a saw to its face. 

Varun U. Shetty is a writer and critical care physician. He grew up in Mumbai and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in Palette Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, Frontier Poetry, Harbor Review, Westchester Review, and others. He won the 2022 F. Sean Hodge Prize for Poetry in Medicine. To read more of his work, visit www.varunushetty.com.