We never shared a shift report in the early hours of the morning. If we passed each other in a hallway or stood in line for coffee in wrinkled, mismatched scrubs, I wouldn’t have known who you were.

But I knew you.

I knew you by the ache in your feet after twelve hours on the floor. I knew you by the weight you carried in your pocket and your heart. I grieve for you because you knew the cost of caring.

You knew the “nursing bladder” and the missed lunches. You knew the feeling of driving home in silence because the radio was too much noise after twelve hours of alarms and never having a break.

You knew the unique isolation of being surrounded by people all day but feeling entirely alone with the burden of their lives at the end of the day. Holding hands, holding breaths, holding the line between hope and loss, then being expected to clock out and return to the world as if nothing followed you home.

We are the keepers of the threshold. You and I — both intensive care nurses — have stood at the place where life bleeds into death, again and again, and we fought darkness with everything we had to push it back. We learned how to be steady while others fell apart. We learned how to absorb grief quietly so the room could stay calm.

It shatters me — no, it enrages me — that a life dedicated to gentleness was met with such brutality. To see a man beaten nearly to death and finished off with several gun shots, a man who dedicated his life to others

It is a betrayal beyond words that violence found you. You, who stood between strangers and death, deserved a world that protected you in return. You knew how to save others, but we couldn’t save you from the darkness that others brought to your door.

Your hands were trained to hold pressure on wounds, perform CPR, and heal. They should not have been raised in to have to to record men tormenting our streets, our families, and our lives. Your eyes were trained to read monitors and look for signs of life; they should not have been forced to look into the face of such pure hatred.

“A nurse is one who opens the eyes of a newborn and gently closes the eyes of a dying man. It is indeed a high blessing to be the first and last to witness the beginning and end of life.”

— Unknown

I weep for a stranger because I know exactly what the world has lost You are part of a family that spans every hospital, clinic, and hallway. You were not just a nurse; you were one of us. This world had someone great stolen from it yesterday.

We will not let this slide into silence. We will not let your name become just another statistic in ICE brutality. We demand justice for your stolen years. We demand that the cowardly brutality visited upon you be answered with the full weight of the law. You stood up for your community, and now your community must stand up for you.

You may not have been my coworker, but you are my kin.

Love, a fellow American Nurse