disastermagnet

"And these are the rest of the 2000s here, and then over there, and then the last few 2000s are in that other room that we just acquired" she explains, waving her arms in the directions of the shelves she's referring to.
"Okay, is there anything else in there?" I ask, pointing to the smaller room.
"Uh, yeah I think there's still some of the '99s in there" she says and heads through the doorway into another room with an unbelievably high ceiling, and I follow dutifully. She looks, says "Yeah, see, here are the 2000s, and..." she glances at the shelves in the middle of the room "yeah, here are some more 99s that haven't been moved to MIller's yet."
I nod, making mental notes as a I walk along the high shelves. At the far wall of the room I see a more sparsely populated shelf and I ask "Are these still...."
and she interrupts and says, rather abruptly, "Those are the deaths."
I nod, trying not to look surprised. Of COURSE there are death records, this is a hospital. People die here.
She gestures toward one end of the shelving cabinet "See?" indicating a sheet of 8.5X11 paper with the word "Deaths" printed on it in a large blocky font. She grabs on of the files off the shelf and indicates a small orange tag sticking out of the spine.
"See. the deaths always have these little things that say 'exp.' on them. There's 99s down there, and these are all the more recent ones." She says, concluding my tour of the records archive on a rather grim note.
I stare at the shelves in spite of myself. All night I'm working with medical records, and until now I haven't really felt like I was intruding on anyone's privacy. But somehow I feel like I don't have any right to touch these. I know that if I grab any one of these files and flip through I'll see a clinical retelling of problems that these people never saw the resoultion of; of obstacles they never surmounted.
Humbling. To say the least.