My body count lay in the hundreds of thousands.  I had freed nations from dictators, slew zombies with impunity, destroyed criminal empires and even started a few of my own, and executed kills which would take off a person’s head and eviscerate their internal organs.  I had my face spattered with my blood and the blood of those standing in my way.  But this woman was different.  I had never seen anything quite like this old woman lying in front of me.  She was alone, save for me and another person.  She was also dying.  I watched as her face slowly turned blue, and then purple, as oxygen no longer flowed toward her brain and skin – hypoxia at its worst.  I saw how her heart grew weaker with each passing second; the delay between beats grew until finally it stopped beating completely.  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.  This woman’s eyes were looking at me, but staring beyond me at nothing at all, glazed over and partially reflecting my pale face.

Flash forward four years later.  I still remember that woman’s face and how she looked.  I justified it in my mind that she was old and her time was up.  I moved past her and continued on my way.  Then I was confronted with another woman, except this one was young and very attractive.  She was also dead, even though I had tried to save this one.  She shouldn’t have died, and was only a few years older than me.  Her hair was red, unlike the grayish white of the other woman.  A petite young woman, she looked like she took very good care of herself, and certainly had no life-altering bad habits.  Her face too was purple, her eyes glazed over in a death trance.  Her wallet was sitting on the table near me, and I reached out for it, opening it up to her driver’s license.  I had wanted to know this young woman’s name.  In her picture, she was smiling, so full of life, looking forward to plans later in the day that picture was taken, headed to work soon after or school, or maybe just happy to get one errand done in the day and move onto the next.  It was also taken a little over a year earlier.  Her family ended up arriving, and I had to leave; their faces so full of pain and sadness it mirrored my own.  I really did try to save her too, but I didn’t know how I could say that while my mouth was so dry.  It was made worse that she was engaged, her ring lying on the table next to her purse.  It turns out her fiancé was serving over in Iraq – a country in a region I had seen many times, but from a different perspective; through a television and with a controller in my hands.  I walked away and started to cry a little, sad at the news her fiancé would receive, and sad that a young, pretty girl like that is now dead for no good reason.

My name is Mark, and these are the two faces that will haunt me for the rest of my life.  These are the faces of people who died in real life, and what death really looks like.  There is no dramatic final scene, no thumping orchestral music, and no experience gained unless you want to count the kind that comes from living day-to-day.  I have been playing video games since I was five years old, way back on the NES.  Violent video games were always a part of my life, and I never blinked an eye when I was told to kill.  So it should be expected that when faced with death, it’s no big deal.  After all, I had seen countless deaths, both graphic and subtle, in video games right?  Wrong.  I was 21 years old when I saw someone actually die – her heart slowly stopping as the doctor decided enough was enough – and it was in that ER when I was a volunteer.  A little over a year ago, four years after I saw that and now working in the ER, I saw that young woman come in already mostly dead from a massive asthma attack.  The argument, that violent video games desensitize children to violence and death is complete and utter bullshit, and I am walking proof of it.

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