On one recent intensive care unit shift, I admitted a man whose heart had stopped earlier that day. By the time I met him, it seemed clear that he wasn’t going to live. So when he went into cardiac arrest for what I suspected would be the last time, I headed out of the unit to find his wife.

The nurses had told her to wait in the family room and though we hadn’t met, I instantly knew who she was. Leaning against a wall, eyes bleary and absent. I introduced myself and explained that my team had started CPR again. I was worried that it wouldn’t bring him back.

Then I asked her what might seem like strange question: “Do you want to be there while we do CPR?”

She hesitated and then nodded. “Come with me,” I said. We moved quickly. Inside the room it was chaos, an intern in the midst of chest compressions while another drilled into her husband’s shin for emergent IV access. For a moment I wished that I could take the question back and purge the image from her memory.

“Are you sure you want to stay?” I asked. “You don’t have to.”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She was wearing a bright pink sweatshirt with a happy slogan on it. When she had put it on that morning, her 50-year-old husband just had a cold that wouldn’t go away. Now she had learned that he actually had leukemia that had caused his heart to fail. It was too fast, she told me. She needed to see it all for herself so that she could believe it was true.