But let’s get things straight, first and foremost: I appear, for all intents and purposes, to be a 'strong' person. I get along well with people and I speak clearly. I make eye contact and I listen when spoken to. I have some muscle definition and I consider myself to be quite reasonably intelligent and I‘ll be 26 years old this week.
But outward appearances don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to being strong. That’s one of life’s biggest jokes, I‘ve learned.
What I’m about to tell you happened not long after I'd turned 18. I’ve never before written about it, and I can count on one hand the amount of people to whom I’ve made a concerted effort to not only talk about what happened, but to tell the story. And it’s not because I have tried to keep it to myself. In a way, I guess I have, as it’s not exactly a story for mixed company. I’ve no problems writing about it.
At its core, this is a story of an accident. But there’s really no such thing. Things just happen. End of story.
An aside, first, about stories: the funny thing about them is that they never really end. Of course, plots change and settings change and characters change -- or they just die, as in this story -- but truly, no story really ends.
*****
I grew up in a town of about 600 people and, being the upstanding young man I was, participated as a cadet on the local volunteer fire department. My dad was on it, though I can’t remember that being a big influence on my choice to join. My little brother was on it, too. I like to think I had an influence on that decision, but maybe my dad did. Like I said, I can’t remember.
I liked being on the department because I was strong physically. When you’re growing up and you are put in a setting with a lot of men around, there‘s this ever-present feeling that you‘ve got something to prove. I was no exception. I had something to prove, I just didn’t know what.
My brother, he’s a big part of this story. At least, from my perspective, he is, but still not until after the climax.
That’s another funny thing about stories: depending on whom you talk to, they can be told in very different ways. Different characters might take prominence over others, different conversations might unfold and you might see things from a different perspective. But by definition, the story stays the same.
Mostly.
*****
The first time I saw a dead body, I was 18 years old. The body belonged to a young girl with whom my brother was quite close. That made the two of us more than familiar with one another -- the girl and me -- even though that isn’t important.
This girl though, with the body: she wasn’t exactly dead when I saw her. The EMTs -- not paramedics, there is a difference -- that showed up to load her profoundly broken body into the ambulance told me so.
“She coded most of the way to the hospital,” they said.
“Coded” is a medical term for some very serious shit happening. If you ever start “coding,” you probably won’t remember. People might tell stories about you, though, or even to you, if you make it back home from wherever the ambulance took you.
This girl died later that night. Some people probably said she was strong, for holding on to dear life like she did. I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think she knew what was going on.
In any case, it’s a horrible thing to say, but she was as good as dead when I saw her. I mean no disrespect by that, either, it’s just that the human body is a fragile thing, no matter how strong you think it is.
It doesn’t do particularly well against machinery. In fact, it sometimes doesn’t do so well when it’s controlling machinery.
This was an example of each of those 'sometimes.'
*****
It was Jan. 27, 2005. I was halfway through my senior year of high school and I had come down with my perennial malady that had sidelined me about one week a year since the fourth grade, at least. I think it was a Wednesday, but it might have been a Thursday.
I was at home, more or less enjoying my respite from school, when I heard my phone ring. I thought twice about answering it, as I was more or less under the weather, and I didn’t know that I was committed enough to make the trek from the confines of my warm bed to the kitchen, from where my phone was beckoning.
Not having any clue who was calling, I remember deciding immediately not to answer the call. I changed my mind, changed it back, and then finally decided I ought to be polite and answer. I got to it late, but did notice it was an acquaintance from school. I immediately dialed her back, as it was one of those instances where you know something is going on, deep down, in your gut.
When she answered on the other end, I could tell it was a frenzy.
It was 3:27 p.m., and I felt like I'd better be ready to be strong.
*****
To be sure, I had seen a dead body before. I might have been 4 or 5 years old, and it was in Nebraska -- fly-over country, if you want to be a dick about it.
I was born there, though even by that time, I’d lived elsewhere. But I was a child, and I didn’t quite understand the concept of home -- not like we understand it as adults, now that we’re ‘grown up’ and starting to realize how strong we really aren’t.
I remember being in a car out near the interstate with my family -- my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, and I -- and there was a man’s body lying in a concrete drainage ditch. The local news reported it was a drunken transient of some kind or another that had imbibed one too many swigs on the rotgut and went all topsy-turvy into the ditch.
He probably broke his neck and shit his pants, likely in that order, though I didn’t think that until much later in life. The only thing I remember is looking across the boulevard from inside of the car, and seeing what looked like a pile of clothes vaguely resembling the shape of a body.
But maybe I don’t even remember that. Maybe it’s a construction of my mind. After all, that was more than 20 years ago. God knows I can’t even remember what side of the fucking building I parked my car earlier in the day.
Strong people lose their cars all the time, right?
*****
Anyway, the idea of memories is what’s important here; it’s memories that make stories worth telling, after all, and what we can’t remember, we fill in with bullshit. It might be believable bullshit, and out of respect for the reader (and hopeful reverence for myself as an author) I feel like we should at least try to temper our bullshit.
Anyhow, the next dead body I remember seeing was my great-grandmother’s. I don’t remember anything about her except for the fact that, during her funeral, they had all the great-grandkids place these “totems” on top of her casket that reminded the family of her.
I carried measuring cups, and I remember they made a funny, hollow plastic sound when they were handed to me. It being a Catholic service, I recall the piercing smell of incense burning. My eyes began watering and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the incense or because my great-grandmother had died.
Like I said, I have no recollection of her aside from those measuring cups. And the incense.
But I do remember that once I started crying, things really escalated. It was the first uncontrollable outpouring of emotion I can remember.
The strange thing was that, even though I was so young at the time, I remember not being able to put my finger on what emotion I was feeling.
Whatever it was, it didn’t feel like strength.
*****
The EMTs eventually told me they couldn’t believe the amount of blood the girl lost in the ambulance, but I could.
I had parked my car in the middle of the street and made the somber quarter-block walk toward the scene of this girl‘s broken body, and in doing so, I remember this near-philosophical sense of serenity take hold.
There was a strange silence and calm in my head, even though I was not 30 feet from a scene of literal pandemonium. Imagine a group of 15- and 16-year-old kids that just saw a close friend die in virtual slow-motion.
Everyone’s heard about people that get hit by speeding vehicles on the side of the highway. This couldn’t have been more opposite.
You see, this girl and a friend had decided to catch a ride home from school on the hood of this other girl’s car. School was just a few blocks from her house and they said the driver couldn’t have been going more than 10 miles an hour when this girl started to slip. It was icy out, and cold, and the driver said she thought this girl would just pop right up and laugh it off.
But she didn’t.
As I got closer, I saw a couple of my buddies from my graduating class vomiting in the snow on the side of the street. One of them had their shirt off. I immediately thought they’d been fighting with someone, in a show of how strong they were.
But one of them looked like he was crying, so I could tell that strength wasn’t a characteristic he was concerned with.
*****
It was odd when the EMTs told me how much blood this girl lost because I, myself, could hardly believe there was any left in her. Usually, “blood in the streets” is only referenced in times of rebellion, or in rock ‘n’ roll. This was neither of those things.
The machine that ended this girl’s life was a purple Dodge, or a Chrysler. I remember because it had four doors and it seemed conspicuously smaller than my own car, an Oldsmobile, which had only two doors. It was facing toward me as I approached this most peculiar scene.
I got closer to the car and stepped around the passenger side. That’s when I saw the blood, and the body, and my buddy’s shirt helplessly draped over it. Her pants were torn and you could see a little bit of her underwear, even though my friend’s shirt tried to hide that.
I still don’t know why he didn’t cover her face, which was also torn.
Being a volunteer firefighter, I’ve always thought that I should have checked her pulse, or done chest compressions -- something to show that I was strong. But something inside told me I knew better, that this girl was broken beyond repair.
So I decided to be strong for other people.
*****
I had to go to the fire station on Saturday, for what they call a CISD. They pronounce it like it’s spelled -- sizz-dee -- as do most people in clubs or groups that you’ve got to prove yourself to be a part of. It stands for Critical Incident Stress Debriefing.
I understand every word but the last one.
That was where they told me this girl had “coded” on the way to the hospital, that she had bled an unbelievable amount of blood in the ambulance, and that they had given her some kind of heavy-duty emergency injection through her sternum on the way, presumably to keep her alive.
They asked me to recount what I could remember and I did. Mostly, I remember still
feeling that numbing sense of serenity in my head, though it wasn’t a comfortable feeling. It was alien.
It was a strong feeling.
****
A few days later, I finally broke down. I was smoking cigarettes with my mom and talking about dead bodies. All of the sudden, there it was again: that gratuitous outpouring of emotion. Like I’d been given a handful of measuring cups and had taken a huge whiff of incense.
I remember it felt good to get it out, but it was simultaneously excruciating. It’s kind of like when you take some strong hallucinogenic drugs, and they’re really starting to come on strong, and even though you kind of want to go back to normal, you figure that you’re too far along anyway and just go with it.
It takes strength to let that kind of emotion out, to let your mind take over and give your body a break. No matter how strong you think you are, life will always prove to you that, in the battle of mind and matter, the mind will always win.
For that reason, I’ll never forget the first time I saw a dead body.
I wrote this item on a whim back in November 2012. Never before had I written about the experience of witnessing the grisly accident, and I have only talked about it a handful of times with a handful of people. And not because I dislike talking about it, rather, it merely took some time to finally realize how good an idea it might be to finally put some thoughts into writing. The experience of writing it (which took about an hour or so) I found very enjoyable.
No comments:
Post a Comment