Where's the soul?

We have a girl here in our unit who has been dead for two days. We don't know what to do. She's on life support--a machine is breathing for her, but her brain is dead. She's a teenager--came in as a trauma about two weeks ago. Her mother sat at her side for days. Now she's disappeared. Throughout, the mother never seemed to quite understand what was happening. For example, the mother said to me "I keep hearing the word 'anoxic' do you think that means this whole thing might have hurt her brain?" I had to help deliver the news with Baggins, our fellow. Baggins is all right. He's short and used to stink--until one of the nurses told him very bluntly to use deodorant. Problem solved! He walked right into the supply room, grabbed some speed stick and gave himself a swish in view of all of us. He used to be an army nurse and served in the Gulf war--the first one. He's a good doctor, but sometimes hard to take. The other residents, from more privileged backgrounds, really resent him and look down on him. He brags a lot. Things like "if I can't get that line, no one can." But it's true. I stick up for him quietly. He doesn't know it. There are a few residents in particular who make his life miserable, and when they're at the bedside screwing something up, I'll say very innocently "Do you want me to page Dr. Baggins?"--Sometimes the fact that he used to be a nurse makes him easier to work with, and sometimes it makes him harder.
Bedside, Baggins is never taken well by families. He lacks that patrician element of detachment most docs cultivate, and, being a former nurse, he doesn't believe he's God. His grammar's bad and he's kind of coarse and like all nurses, he doesn't know how to dress. but I don't mind him. Delivering hard news like that, though, is hard enough without Baggins beside you doing it.
"I'm so very sorry,"he finished.
The mother just nodded when we told her. "Are her other parts getting blood flow?" She asked calmly
"Yes."
"Why isn't her brain getting blood?"
The girl had been swimming in a pond at a band party at someone's farm. No one knew for sure how long she'd been under. They'd just lost track of her. They pulled her out and performed CPR. She was life-flighted to the ER, and when she arrived in our ICU she was able to respond and follow commands. Her CT scan was fine initially. This is one of the horrible things about head injuries--they can take awhile to develop. The brain swells gradually, so the injured can seem fine--and then worsens and, if you're unlucky, dies.
"Why was she okay when she came in? What did you do to her?" She asks this of Baggins. Baggins launched into a long explanation of anoxic injury. He loves to explain things. The mother lets him talk for awhile.
"What is the next step?" she asks
Baggins explains that the girl has been pronounced dead and that we are awaiting her (the mother's) decision on when to formally withdraw care.
"She could still wake up." The mother insists. Then her cell phone rings. She takes the call.
Baggins stares at her. We wait for a minute for her to get off the phone. She continues talking. We wait another five minutes. No sign of ending the conversation. Baggins gives me a look. Then he gets up and leaves.
I sit next to her quietly, waiting for her to finish. She keeps chatting, ignoring me. I wait a few more minutes, but she keeps talking, ignoring me. I stand up, touch her shoulder. She looks at me, throws me a beautiful, graceful smile, dismisses me with a wave and turns back to her phone.
I went back to the unit. The mother didn't return for the rest of the afternoon. Or that evening. Or the next day. We can't find her. The girl is lying there alone. Waiting. We're all waiting. We have no idea what to do. She looks like she's sleeping. She's like a princess in some fairy tale gone wrong.

Late Sunday afternoon, an old man came to the room. "Are you the nurse?" he asks. The nurse. It's an interesting turn of phrase: "the nurse" Everyone uses it. There's a nice functional anonymity to it. There are people in our lives that we need to have not be people. We need the role they play, but we don't need any messy personality to deal with, so that we can live out our own dramas without really realizing we are part of a greater whole. The story can still be about us.

"Yes," I said, "I'm the nurse."
"Can you tell me how she's doing?"
I always feel like an asshole for saying this, but I have to, to strangers. My boyfriend says I've turned into "the man" "Do you have the password?" I ask.
"I'm the farmer." He says. Ah. He owns the pond.
"Ah." then "would you like to go inside the room?"
"Is that all right, without the password?"
"No one else is here." I shrug.
He goes to the door and stands there, looking at the girl. He doesn't go inside. I get up and stand next to him.
"Is her mother here?" he asks.
"No."
"Do you know when she'll be back?"
I shake my head. "No one is here."
He stands there a moment longer. "Jesus have mercy on us," he says quietly, not just saying it, but really asking. Then he leaves.
And for some reason, that's when I lost it. I've been taking care of this girl for two weeks, there have been days when I haven't even left the room, we were working so hard to save her. You get focused on your tasks sometimes, you forget the simple sadness. My pet peeve is selfishness, losing the big picture. And I do it all the time.
But I can't lose it in a way that anyone can see, especially my supervisor Hycwicz. More on him later. I'll get silently reproached with melodrama. I can't leave the unit, my wonderful sensitive staff will know I'm upset right away. (Other nurses are such a pain in the ass that way--especially ones you work with closely) So I go into the patient's room and step into the unused shower, where I can't be seen, and then I cry.


And that's my half hour.