This is not your death. From under a plastic surgical cap you see them gently lift the heart from her chest. Place it into a shallow basin; wash it with care but this unsettles you. Like tenderly bathing a child, they carry on cleaning the organ and ignore you. Today they came for you at dawn, sirens calling out into the morning, ripping your windows in tortured repetition while a medic swings open two white doors, this room, this hall made for your inadequate body. There are only two things to do in an operating room: meet the eye-line of your surgeon and try to hold it, or, imagine a naked woman smoothing back the splintered ends of your exposed valves. This is not your death but a prelude, clinked out on the stainless steel table where someone lays down a clamp, a knife, where your silence agrees to die without you.