The First Step Towards the Door..

Back when I was a steady sector car operator, working straight midnights, I received a call early one morning, at around 5:30AM, of an unresponsive elderly woman. The call came over as an 'inhalator' call, meaning that the subject of the call.. the victim, or the patient... was not breathing, or their breathing was either not detectable or was so shallow as to be difficult to notice to an untrained person.

These early morning calls are somewhat regular, and are basically depressing. What a cop reads into them from past experience is that someone passed from this place at some point in the night. When everyone else starts waking up, they make an unsettling discovery, and, partly due to denial, and partly because they don't know (and couldn't know) what the condition of the victim actually is, they call an ambulance.

Now, this may sound cynical, but I don't mean it to be.... but, (why does there always have to be a 'but'??), the vast majority of these calls aren't actually medical aid calls when the dust settles... they end up being calls where the police take custody of the person's remains until the medical examiner arrives and the body is removed.

Because this is so often the case, most cops have developed a tried and true, though somewhat unsettling method of protecting themselves emotionally from these situations... they keep everyone (everyone) at arm's distance at these calls.

This, of course makes us seem callous, cold, and heartless. I suppose that on some level, we are at that point in time... but, when you have to deal with this day in and day out, you have to do something to protect your own mental health, and this is one of those things. The irony is that it doesn't actually work. At all. It gives us the illusion of having protected ourselves, but, it is all a stinking pile of bullshit from start to finish. Its just a great big act to help us to dance away from the personal responsibility of having to face someone else's death and its effect on their loved ones and to actually feel what that feels like...

Don't get me wrong. We feel it. We just don't want to appear as though we feel it... to anyone else... or to ourselves...

Back to the story;

I arrived at the location of the call, popped the trunk, let the dispatcher know that I had arrived, grabbed the oxygen and aid kit out of the trunk and ran inside. An old man met me at the back door. His white hair was mussed, his glasses were askew, and one tail of his pajama shirt was hanging out while the other was tucked in. He carefully unlocked the series of locks on the back door and let me in.

The door opened into the kitchen. The place had the washed out, faded look and smell of countless other houses that I had been in where a couple had lived out their lives and grown old while living in the same house. I'm sure that it was home to them, but it was depressing to me on the best of days.

He introduced himself (I'll call him 'Mr. Sweeney' for the sake of this story.. it isn't his real name, as you have probably already guessed), and led me into the bedroom. A woman lay on the bed. She was very, very still. Mr. Sweeney did not enter the bedroom, but hovered worriedly by the bedroom door. He was dancing from foot to foot, and wringing his hands.

I approached the woman, who was laying on her right side. I checked for a pulse. Her skin was cold to the touch. I checked for capillary refill on the fingernails of her hands, but there was none. I could see that dependant lividity had set in on the underside of her face, neck, and, where I could see the skin, on her arms. I was fairly certain that she was dead, but that isn't a call that I can legally make unless there are certain obvious textbook signs of death. I continued with my examination, moving quickly, but not rapidly, not wanting to risk missing any obvious signs of importance... be they signs of life, or signs of a crime having taken place. I had no idea what had transpired, and the story that anyone tells me only fills in a few blanks. I always rely on my own observations, and check, double-check, and triple-check everything that I can.

I reached for my flashlight and gently lifted the woman's eyelid to check for pupillary reaction. Her eyes were dilated and the vitreous humor of her eyes had clouded over. There was no pupillary reaction in either eye, and as I moved her head, I could see that rigor mortis had begun to set in. She had apparently died some hours ago during the night. I looked over at Mr. Sweeney, he looked back at me. He looked terrified, and I knew that what I was going to have to tell him was the last thing in the world that he wanted to hear. I also knew from experience that people generally have a sense for these things and will subtly guide you and let you know when to tell them hard facts and when to let them work things out and get their brains around difficult situations that are being imposed upon them....

"Is she going to be alright, officer??" he asked, a pleading note creeping into his voice. He went perfectly still, waiting for my reply. I believe I was the only person in the room who was breathing at that moment.

"Mr. Sweeney... " I began. A single tear welled up and coarsed down his seamed old cheek. I could feel my chest tighten, and my throat begin to tighten. This was very hard. Nobody wants to bear the news that will crush a man's heart into the dust...
I cleared my throat and began again, "Mr. Sweeney, I'm very sorry... she's gone. I wish there was something more that I could do for her, but there isn't."

"She's.... I..... no......." He put his face in his gnarled old hands and sagged against the doorframe. He was trembling. Deep gut-wrenching sobs wracked his body. I walked over and stood beside him for a moment... waiting for the first wave of shock and grief to pass.... Eventually, he looked up at me, shaking his head, not wanting this to be happening, his eyes silently pleading with me to fix it... to bring his wife back, to give her another chance... another day... an hour... a minute... there is always so much that hasn't been said, so much that was never done... I took his arm, "Mr. Sweeney, would you like to come and sit with her for a moment?" He nodded, and I guided him over to the bed. He sat down beside his wife, and he took her cold hand in his. The same hand that he held every day for how many years of marriage?? Forty?? Fifty?? But on this morning, it didn't grasp back.. didn't caress him in turn... I started to move towards the door to give him a moment of privacy. "Officer?" he asked.

"Yes sir?"

"What is your name, young man??"

"My friends call me Bear, Mr. Sweeney."

"Bear?"

"Yes sir."

"..... Bear. Hm. Yes, I can see why they might... Um, Bear? May I ask you something?"

"Sure..."

Tears began to run in rivulets down his face...

"Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do now?"

"..... Sir?..... I...ah... Well, I'll help you with that, and we will put you in touch with some other folks, agencies and whatnot who can assist..."

"No... that isn't what I was asking... You see, Evelyn, that was my wife's name.. Evelyn..", he patted her shoulder, very delicately... and let his hand come to rest there... It occurred to me, and, I'm sure, to him, that it was one of the last times that he would ever be able to do that... my chest constricted, and my throat tightened... I swallowed hard, blinked my eyes a few times, and willed it away...

I took a seat in an arm chair near the window.

"Evelyn was my high school sweetheart. We met at a Christmas Dance in 1947, it was just after the war, you know. We married a few years later. I fell in love with her the first moment that I set eyes on her. She was always smiling and laughing. She always looked as though she knew something about you that was about to make her giggle. We were married for forty-six years. It would have been forty-seven years two months from now. I have been married to her longer than I haven't been married to her. I've quite forgotten what it was like not to be married to her."

He stopped talking then... and I noticed that he was gently rocking his wife, and patting her with his hand. I don't think he noticed that he was doing it... this was a time-honored ritual between them. He stared off into some other time... years past, perhaps... somewhere a clock was ticking off the seconds. We sat quietly like that for some minutes. Finally, he coughed, seemed to remember that I was sitting there with him, with them... "I'm all alone now. Both of our children died years ago. Its funny.. I had always imagined that I would be the first to go. I'm... I'm not sure what it is that I will do now....." His voice was very small. He looked up at me then. His rheumy old blue eyes, puffed and swollen from crying searched my face for an answer. "Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do?? This is my wife... I've stayed at her side for almost fifty years.. They're going to come and take her away from me, and I'll be here all alone."

I searched my brain for an answer, but couldn't come up with one... after a few breaths, my heart told me that in some cases, the only answer is the truth, even though it may not be comfortable or easy to face.

"Mr. Sweeney, I honestly don't know what the answer is to that question. I have never found myself in your situation, and, quite honestly, it frightens me to think that one day I may very well be sitting where you are sitting and asking the very same questions. I don't know what to say to you. I don't think there is a simple answer. I think that for now, maybe it isn't such a good idea to look too far ahead. I would concentrate on taking things a day at a time for now... an hour, or a minute, or a second at a time if you have to. I think Mrs. Sweeney would want you to live on, and I don't think she would want to think that you were heartbroken. I know that she will be in your heart as long as you hold her there. I also know that you won't be all alone. You will have at least one friend who will stop by to see how you are doing, and to ask whether you need anything. I'll give you my phone number at home, and my pager number. You can call me at any time. I work nights, so I'm generally awake all night long. If you need anything, or if you just don't want to be alone, call me and I'll come and sit with you. No questions asked. I'm not sure if that is helpful to you, or if you even want anybody around, but the offer stands."

"He nodded, and laid his head down on his wife's shoulder."

I stood up, and quietly stepped out of the room to let him say his goodbyes and to make his peace with her.

I stopped by and visited Mr. Sweeney two to five times every week until his death two years later.. almost to the day.

I think this may have been my very first step away from the police job.. though I wasn't aware of it then....