Death List

Artwork by Kristina Crisman 2/10/2026

Death List

The quarterly list arrives, a grim reaper’s decree,
I am the one who opens the locked box of me.
Five years of medication failing to hold,
learning to cope as the stories unfold.
With music and audiobooks, I build new walls.
Distraction is my shield, lest I should stumble and fall
into the well of what-ifs, I cannot descend.
So I mark the dead names, and I close out the end.

I no longer wonder if they died alone,
Or if they were held by a family grown.
I do not look up the reports of the slain,
The news of the murder, the sorrow, the pain.
Did you know, there’s a code for it? X90 to X99.
A clinical line in the ledger of time.

C codes are for cancers that eat from within,
my heart breaks for youth where the battle begins.
I hope that the older ones lived lives that they chose,
and that peace has found them as the last chapter closes.
I’m glad that their suffering is finally done,
and happiness waits for the ones who have won.

U07.1 is the mark of the plague,
families were barred from the final fatigue.
How many hands were held by a nurse in safety gear?
Protected by masks so the virus won’t sear.
The beginning was brutal, the lessons were learned,
vaccines were made and the bridges were burned.
The sickness that took them, the numbers have now dropped.
A silence follows at the end of the stop.

V codes are for vehicles, the crash and the spin,
pedestrian, car, boat, bike, ATV, that pin.
I hope that they felt nothing, no fracture, no scream,
that a guardian spirit snatched them from the dream.
I hope that the transition was swift and kind,
leaving no lingering pain in the mind.

X60 to X64, the self-poisoning hand,
the drugs and the meds in the blood on the sand.
My high school best friend, lost to opioid’s grip,
an overdose finally took her on the trip.
Was there something I could have done? Could I have been near?
The questions I ask are the ones I still fear.
I blame pharmaceuticals, the monsters of greed
who refuse accountability for the foul deed.
Did the doctors cut her off? Did she turn to the street?
I will never have answers, the silence is complete.

X70 to X73, the self-harm and rope,
the weapons, the hanging, the water, the hope
to end it all quickly. I wonder if we,
the medical industry, could have been free
to help them much sooner. I wonder what ledge
they stood on, the same one where I was on the edge?
Looking down, wanting to surrender the fight,
to let go of the hurt and give up on the light.
But a voice whispered, “Look up, see the beauty around,”
and I stepped back with hope on that treacherous ground.

R99 is the code for the death that is strange,
with no reason, no history, nothing to change
the fact that the young and the old die,
leaving loved ones to ask the eternal why.
They are taken in silence, a thief in the night,
leaving nothing behind but a fading light.

I am the final Reaper, I mark the deceased,
I enter the date and the cause of the beast.
So many codes, but just a code in the end,
I close their chart, a life no more to defend.
Their names are forgotten by me, the clerk,
as I turn to the next task, the next piece of work.

By M. Bernstein

(First published in The Sandhill Review: Art & Literary Magazine, Fall 2023, by Adams State University.) Revised 2/5/2026