"This is the Oswald County medical examiner, returning a page."
"Hey... um... this is Engine 64, we're calling in to report a DOA."
"Okay, give me the details."
The fireman haltingly listed off the decedent's name and address, then launched into his report about this guy who had bit the big one after seating himself in his living room chair to snack on a banana in the middle of the night. He had all kinds of medical problems, complete with heart disease, diabetes, obesity, emphysema, recent complaints of chest pain... all tied up neatly with a long lost history of cocaine addiction.
I was relieved. It was early morning and I have to admit, I didn't really feel like venturing into the frosty humid air to view the remains of a dead guy who had suffered a heart attack during the night. Statutes dictate that I don't really have to go to the scene of a death unless there's any suspicion or evidence that the death is due to anything other than natural causes.
I know it sounds weird.
It sounded weird to me too at first. During my internship in the big city, we went out to every scene under the sun. Terminally ill people who died in their nursing homes warranted a scene investigation. Here, we just don't have the resources for such behavior. If a death is clearly natural, we don't fiddle with it unless the family goes bonkers with wanting an autopsy or there's a possibility of the decedent having some previously undiagnosed genetic disease. Although, out of sheer precaution and a hyperactive sense of professional survival, I still end up going to dozens more scenes than I probably need to. But this one just wasn't getting me hot. It sounded like the guy had all kinds of reasons to be dead and who was I to argue with him. As the fireman spoke, I jotted down some notes and made ready to call the decedent's primary doctor and christen the entire episode another unremarkable case.
I slid smoothly into my "Is-this-a-natural-death" line of questioning and asked the fireman about his "spider-senses". Was there anything weird going on here? Were his instincts buzzing? (They love it when I ask about their "instincts"... every guy who works emergency services in any way, shape or form is absolutely certain that he has a finely-tuned bull-shit detector that borders on ESP. Asking them about their "instincts" is always a good way to get the fire-guys to play nice... despite the fact that, in my experience, most of them are about as sharp as a roll of wet toilet paper.)
"Well...." the fireman stuttered.
"What... what's up?"
"Well... this guy... he owned a couple of pit-bulls, and it... well, it looks like they kind of... got to him..."
...
"Really?"
"Yeah, half of his face is gone."
"No shit?" I asked, momentarily forgetting that we were on a recorded line.
"None at all." said the fireman, who apparently remembered that we were on a recorded line.
"Okay," I said, glancing around the room for my jump bag, "Can you direct me in from 56th and Broadway?"
Sounding relieved, the fireman rattled off the directions. My decision to come to the scene meant that his job was officially done and he could go back to the station house and cook chili... or lift weights... or whatever it is firemen do when they're not riding around in their big red truck flexing for girls in halter tops. Realistically, with a minor display of logistical gymnastics, I could have avoided the whole situation and left it for the police to thread through. But I have to admit, I was unbelievably curious to see what two pit-bulls would do to a human body that couldn't fight back.
In a matter of minutes I was dressed and on my way, arriving in record time to my first ever pit-bull mauling. It's actually fairly common for dogs to eat their owners, post-mortem. People don't want to think about it, but the fact is dogs like to eat gross stuff. They lick each other butt-holes, after all. I theorize that when they're exposed to certain smells, a primal instinct awakens and they dig right in. I've seen dalmations do it, corgis do it. Hell, I can't wait for that crazy lady who lives downstairs from me to kick the bucket... not only because her cigarettes stink up my apartment, but mainly because I want to see that toy poodle that she dresses up in goofy little fairy costumes go all pre-evolutionary on her ass and help itself to a few bites of "mommy". I can't think of anything funnier than seeing that dog in a blood-flecked pink tutu with a disembodied hand hanging out of it's mouth.
When I got to the house, the entire front living room was densely populated with neighbors and friends. I glanced around and located a police officer I knew and trusted. I getsured for him to join me on the front porch and we had our little pow-wow.
"Dude," I hissed at him, "who are all those people?"
"She said she wanted them here..." he shrugged
"Well... where's the BODY?" I asked, noting that the house wasn't very big and since I had been told that this guy had died in his living room, he had to be somewhere nearby. Everyone I'd seen in the living room was still breathing with their faces intact, so they didn't fit the bill.
"He's in the back living-room"
"Umm... okay" I muttered, giving the cop my best are-you-fucking-KIDDING-me look.
"Yeah, I know" he said acknowledging the staggering idiocy of the arrangement. The family was way too close and we both knew it. And I don't mean "way too close" as in they bathed together or anything. Proximity-wise, they were way too close to the body. Their access to him wasn't inhibited at all. Any one of them could have simply walked around the corner and flung themselves, weeping, on to the faceless corpse. Death makes people squirrly, unpredictable, irrational and prone to some truly depraved displays of grief. It's always a bad idea not to have a least one door between the body and the family. They don't need to be subjected to hearing your detached, indifferent description of their loved one's remains. And no matter how creative or professional you are, there's just no way to explain your actions to a family member who walks in to find you've got their dead grandpa's pants around his knees, cheeks spread, checking to see if there's anything... unexpected shoved up his rectum.
We stepped back inside and I introduced myself to the decedent's widow, a plump red-head who had the look of being an otherwise jovial character. She gave me a brave, shaky smile as I explained to her what I would be doing, and she agreed to wait to talk to me until after I'd had a chance to take in the whole scene.
With that done, I crossed into a little dining area and found the decedent's body, sitting in a lay-z-boy, no more than 3 feet away from the open doorway to the front living room where all of his friends and family were seated. I would have popped off with some exaperated expletive, but for the fact that there was absolutely NO isolation from the grieving family. the firemen had at least covered the guy with a sheet and herded the perpetrating dogs into a back bedroom, but all the same I couldn't believe they hadn't cleared out the house entirely. Seriously, what the fuck?
I pulled the sheet aside to survey the damage, and the fireman had been right. From about the nose-level down, all the meat had been chewed off of the guy's face... right down to the bone. All the strata of his soft tissue could be clearly seen, the fleshy epidermis, the billowy yellow pillows of adipose and fat, the stringy red loops of muscle, all pulled away to reveal the hard, sharp, pink angles of his mandible. His lower teeth were naked of the lower lip and his tongue bulged out slightly from between his clenched jaws. On the floor nearby, was the smashed cadaver of the banana in question.
"Woah" I said softly.
Though the overall scene was grotesque, the wounds had obviously been inflicted post mortem. If his heart had been beating, and therefore moving blood though his arteries and veins, the body... and the entire room... would have been a mess of smeared carnage. But since blood stops flowing when the heart stops, there wasn't a spot of it anywhere. Furthermore, there was no indication that there had been any struggle at all. The guy's hands, arms and chest were completely free of defensive wounds or marks. His flesh must have fallen off the bone like meat from a well cooked lamb-shank.
The dogs knew.
When I was a kid, living in a charasmatic Christian home, there was always a lot of talk about angels and demons and other metaphysical entities. One thing I had always been told was that animals, dogs especially, were acutely tuned in to "the spiritual realm." Supposedly, dogs knew when there were evil spirits about. Or they sensed when a person was a bad-apple. I don't know how true that is, but I have to admit that dogs DO seem to know things. My parents had a delightful litte bichon-frise who loved everyone... except my boyfriend who later turned out to be a psychotic, cheating bastard. Upon their first and only meeting, she shied away from him as though he'd been on fire. And we all hear about those stories in which a dog rescues his family from a burning house... or mauls an attacking burglar. Even in my own experience, dogs usually love me- but there have been times when I've been in a particularly foul mood and normally cordial canines have made a wide circle around me. Dogs know things. And in this case, the dogs knew the truth... they knew the guy wasn't there anymore. I know pit-bulls have a nasty reputation, but the dead guy's wife swore that the dogs never would have "attacked" him, and I believed her. I sincerely think that in their minds, the dogs didn't attack him. All that was left of their master was... well.. it was a nice big hunk of meat- garnished with a banana... and since no one else seemed to be using it...
I explained this phenomenon as judiciously as I could to the decedent's wife. And I assured her that the dogs were not going to begin eating people on a regular basis, at least... I didn't think they would.
"I've seen dachsunds do this..." I told her... exaggerating only a little. The fact is, I've never seen a dachsund eat someone's face off, but dachsunds would do it if they could reach high enough. Of that I was certain.
I exited the scene as gracefully as possible... seeing as how I had just left everyone in the room with the impression that all of them would end up being devoured by their pets if they had the misfortune of dying with the animals in the house. Oh well.
Death happens, you leave your body behind. Dogs know... it seems they pick up on truths that remain elusive to the human race. People are compelled do all kinds of wacky things with "remains". We spend thousands of dollars on embalming and caskets and burial. We smear the dead with make-up and dress them in their favorite out-fits in an effort to make them appear alive when they're clearly not. We dedicate some of the best real-estate available to the internment of people who, let's face it, really have no right to be taking up space on the physical plane anymore. We go to cemeteries to "visit" our deceased families when they're actually nothing but dust within a matter of months. I once had an employer who would leave his mom's ashes in an easy chair in front of the television while he was at work. Hell, I've even heard of people taking the bodies of a loved one to a company that will make an actual diamond out of the carbon in the cadaver. I have to admit, I don't get it. While I cannot say for certain what happens to your consciousness or your spirit when you die, I can sure as hell tell you what happens to your body after you die. When you look at a dead body- you really know, that person is truly NOT there. And would you bury a coat that didn't fit you anymore? Would you go to visit the grave of the sneakers you wore out? What remains of people is what they did, who they affected, how they lived... these things are not bound to an innert cluster of tissue and fluid.
Dogs eat dead stuff, whether it's a flattened bird in the street, or the leftover body of a person who doesn't need it anymore. Quite frankly, I think they did the widow a favor, seeing as how they spared her the expenses involved in a viewing and an open casket. It may sound calloused, it may be sacreligious, I can't say I agree with their methods, but I think the dogs got it right on this one. Bodies are leftovers... pass the ketchup.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Here kitty, kitty...
"It’s a hoarded house…" the deputy mumbled to me- as discretely as possible, what with the family within ear-shot and all.
I nodded, careful to keep my face as placid as possible. That’s one of the tricks no one tells you to learn… one of the lessons you pick up from experience: look unruffled and distantly concerned…. But not too concerned.
If you look bored, the family will think you’re not taking their loved one’s death seriously.
But if you look horrified, or astonished, or disgusted… they will suspect you’re judging them, judging the dead person- thinking all kinds of horrible things about them… which, of course... maybe you ARE, but they don’t need to know that- or at least they don’t need to read it all over your face.
If a family does feel judged, or "looked down on" they clam up like murder suspects and later complain to your bosses. Their accusations are usually vague, claiming "she was rude" or "she was unprofessional". Once, I even had one guy complain because I was writing things down in my notebook. Specifically, he was upset that I made note of his wife’s statement that their dead son had a history of drug use. It sounds ridiculous but ultimately, even in the midst of an unfathomable tragedy, people are still concerned about "what the neighbors will think." I can't blame them, I suppose. It makes sense that people are sensitive about the questions presented by a loved-one's death- they're ashamed of how they have to answer, and ashamed of the fact that this person died in a fashion that resulted in certain "dirty laundry" being aired in public. And it gets dirty- very dirty, as dirty as… a hoarded house.
I had just picked my way through a jungle-gym of garden tools and lawn equipment that cluttered and choked the front yard and walk-way. I was standing on the front porch as the sheriff’s officer briefed me on what I was about to confront inside. As I listened, I watched the family watching me from the road where they huddled by their vehicles in the rain, arms around one another for warmth and comfort. They were checking me for a reaction, I knew. None of them knew the details just yet, but they were well aware of the fact that nothing about this situation painted them in a good light. They wanted the whole situation to be "not that bad", and were watching for any sign of surprise or astonishment. This whole situation was going to suck, I could feel it. But I kept my face impassive as the officer relayed the story to me.
Inside was a dead guy… no surprise, since I was a deputy medical examiner and for me to be called to any residence someone nearby had to be dead.
Fortunately, it was easy to stay poker-faced since the dead guy’s story was far more common than I think anyone could realize. The guy had been unemployed and living in that house with his mother for the last 10 years. While the other kids would come by and check to make sure everyone was still breathing, no one had actually entered the residence in over a decade. The mother had suffered a debilitating stroke a month ago and was moved to a local nursing home. The son, our dead guy, was being evicted from the house since he couldn’t afford the rent without his mother’s social security. Keeping with tradition, his sister had come by almost daily to make sure he was okay, but never actually came into the house. She would pull up to the end of the driveway in her car and honk. Then her brother would come out and give her a status update. She would remind him that he needed to get the house packed up, and that would be that. Except this last time, she pulled up and honked her horn, but no one came out.
The officer went on to tell me that the guy had a history of drug use, and at least 2 overdoses under his belt prior to this… the incident which we sanitized by calling it his "terminal event" as opposed to his "latest and greatest adventure with controlled substances" or his "epic fail" or his "personal quest for room temperature."
The officer, who apparently had not yet learned the "straight face" lesson, emphasized with a wide eyed grimace, "It’s REALLY bad in there!"
I had been eyeing the doorknob and suspected he was right. Doorknobs are one of the first things I evaluate when I enter a house. I’ve come to realize that the degree of filth inside a residence is directly proportional to the diameter of the greasy stain that halo-es the doorknob…. The dirt and oil from unknown years of comings and goings. The residue from people's hands deposits grime around the doorknob- even just the slightest touch of a clean hand- will leave something. If people don't clean it off, or stop cleaning it off- or don’t wash their hands, all that crap collects around the doorknob like rings in a tree stump. This guy had the equivalent of a California Redwood smeared on his door.
I took a deep breath, realizing it might be the last whiff of fresh air I may catch for a few hours, and swung the door open.
I entered the home with the officer hovering behind me, waiting for my expletive.
I’m relieved to say, that while the house was, in fact, disgusting… I have seen much, much worse. Additionally, while our dead guy was undoubtedly past his expiration date, he was NOT the most decomposed body I’ve ever examined… not even close. The most decomposed body I’ve ever had to examine had long since re-discovered his role in the food chain and was the unwitting benefactor for approximately 10 generations of maggots and blow-flies. This guy, at least, still looked vaguely human.
I resisted the urge to rib the officer for exaggerating. He was obviously new at the job and, by the look of him, barely old enough to buy beer. In fact, I couldn’t help but suspect his crisp, stiff uniform had been rendered so by his mother whom he likely still lived with. I’ve never known a guy in his twenties to look so "pressed" without help. That’s something you notice when you work with the police a great deal, you stop seeing the uniform and start seeing the people underneath them- and you realize how young a lot of these beat cops really are… adolescents paying their dues.
As I stepped into the littered front foyer, the boy-sheriff and I were greeted by a sergeant who had been inside, herding the decedent’s berserk dogs into the garage. The house was not so much hoarded as it was trashed. Clearly the guy would have been a hoarder, if he’d had more stuff to hoard. He had gotten as far into the "packing up" process as he could before clearly giving up and opting to instead take a handful of his mother’s leftover morphine tablets before he passed out on the living room floor.
There were empty book-shelves and drawers, positioned haphazardly about the house with all the contents spread out all over the floor. Other furniture was tipped on it’s side. It appeared as though the guy knew these things needed to be taken out of their respective locations and packed up, but he forgot to locate any boxes in which to pack them. Each bedroom contained a bare mattress, piles of clothes, newspapers, shoes… and animal feces… everywhere you looked. The entire residence had been turned into a giant cat-box, and before you could sneeze and scratch at the hives forming on your face from being exposed to such a mess… the cats themselves began floating to the surface.
I was in the master bedroom, sifting through a pile of blue-jeans with a pair of barbecue tongs I had found on the mattress when I spotted the first cat… staring at me quizzically from it’s perch on an over-turned 5-gallon bucket. But it wasn’t a cat… it was a kitten.
I don’t like cats, as a rule. First of all I’m allergic to them. Secondly, cats are neurotic, unpredictable schizophrenics who don’t have owners as much as they have staff. I tend to like animals that like me back (which may explain my ability to attract gamers, musicians and other fringe personalities.) Kittens, on the other hand, are a horse of a different color. There is very little in this world as endearing and loveable as a kitten. The sudden presence of that fluffy little face completely derailed my death investigation, and the next thing you know, my hunt for the dead guy’s driver’s license in order to establish positive identification was completely abandoned in favor of finding something shiny and fascinating to dangle in front of the kitten's face.
"Hey guys… there are KITTENS." I squealed to the officers who were, likewise, tossing the other bedrooms on a hunt for the missing license.
"Yeah, I know," the sergeant called back to me, "I’ve spotted at least two so far."
"Oh my GOD, they are SOOOOOOOOOO cute!" I cooed, extending my hand to the little black scamp, who was having nothing of it and leapt off the bucket, dashing back into the living room. I followed, deciding that the dead guy leaving his driver’s license in his mother’s bedroom made about as much sense as keeping a pair of barbecue tongs on the mattress.
"I didn’t find anything." The younger officer said to me as he joined me in the living room. We both watched as one large cat, presumably the brood’s mother, wandered out of her home in the dilapidated entertainment center and stood before us with an expectant, almost polite, gaze.
"Terribly sorry about the state of the place," she seemed to say "I don’t suppose any of you could be troubled to feed us?"
I tried to refocus as the police officers went outside to question the family about tattoos and scars for identification purposes. I pulled out my camera and addressed the stiff and bloated gentleman laying on the living room floor. With each "click" of my camera as I photographed our decedent, another kitten meandered into the room to observe me at work. When I looked up, I had no less than 4 kittens, either lounging on the overturned television, or tip-toeing closer to me and the dead body to determine what was so fascinating about the stiff who had been lying on the floor for at least 4 days and was officially old-news in their opinion. I couldn’t help myself.
Click- and I had an adorable rendering of a kitten wrestling with the empty morphine bottle.
Click- and I had a darling photograph of a tiny calico kitten tentatively sniffing the out-streched, rigored hand of the corpse.
Click- and I had a desk-top worthy pic of the little black kitten demurely seated on the dead guy’s chest with her tail curled around her feet-
The more photos I took, the more the kittens seemed to enjoy the whole "Kittens with Corpses" theme we had going on.
Eventually, the police came back in, and I had to be a little more… tactful with my photography. But I still collected a slew of pictures of the kittens climbing the filthy kitchen counter, batting around loose morphine tablets in the bathroom and I captured a particularly endearing photo of the kittens swatting at the sergeant’s radio as he waved the antennae in front of them.
We all had to thoroughly compose ourselves when we left the house to address the family about our findings. It was the first time I ever ad to employ the "keep a straight face" tactic because I’d had so much damnned fun.
Furthermore, I had to resist the urge to ask the family if I could take one of them home with me… but I couldn’t imagine how I’d explain to my husband (who’s ALSO allergic to cats) how I came to return from a death scene with a little black kitten that smelled like decomp.
"Please baby, can’t we keep him?" I heard myself begging, "he’s not just a kitten… he’s a CADAVER kitten."
I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to my boss why all of my scene photos prominently feature a corpse, heavily decorated with kittens. But honestly, what are they going to say? Everyone at the scene was much more at ease due to the kitten factor. I think my own hard edged demeanor may have been dulled a bit due to the fact that I had spent most of my time "frolicking" through the scene instead of "trudging" through it. Maybe we can talk finance into investing in a crate of kittens for the deputy medical examiners and sheriffs' officers. I think there would be a lot fewer complaints. Imagine it:
"Well, at first I was kind of offended by all the questions the medical examiner was asking me about my husband's death... things like, 'did he ever use recreational substances' or 'Did he have a history of depression or suicide attempts.' I was GOING to complain... but.. you know... she had that kitten with her..."
I nodded, careful to keep my face as placid as possible. That’s one of the tricks no one tells you to learn… one of the lessons you pick up from experience: look unruffled and distantly concerned…. But not too concerned.
If you look bored, the family will think you’re not taking their loved one’s death seriously.
But if you look horrified, or astonished, or disgusted… they will suspect you’re judging them, judging the dead person- thinking all kinds of horrible things about them… which, of course... maybe you ARE, but they don’t need to know that- or at least they don’t need to read it all over your face.
If a family does feel judged, or "looked down on" they clam up like murder suspects and later complain to your bosses. Their accusations are usually vague, claiming "she was rude" or "she was unprofessional". Once, I even had one guy complain because I was writing things down in my notebook. Specifically, he was upset that I made note of his wife’s statement that their dead son had a history of drug use. It sounds ridiculous but ultimately, even in the midst of an unfathomable tragedy, people are still concerned about "what the neighbors will think." I can't blame them, I suppose. It makes sense that people are sensitive about the questions presented by a loved-one's death- they're ashamed of how they have to answer, and ashamed of the fact that this person died in a fashion that resulted in certain "dirty laundry" being aired in public. And it gets dirty- very dirty, as dirty as… a hoarded house.
I had just picked my way through a jungle-gym of garden tools and lawn equipment that cluttered and choked the front yard and walk-way. I was standing on the front porch as the sheriff’s officer briefed me on what I was about to confront inside. As I listened, I watched the family watching me from the road where they huddled by their vehicles in the rain, arms around one another for warmth and comfort. They were checking me for a reaction, I knew. None of them knew the details just yet, but they were well aware of the fact that nothing about this situation painted them in a good light. They wanted the whole situation to be "not that bad", and were watching for any sign of surprise or astonishment. This whole situation was going to suck, I could feel it. But I kept my face impassive as the officer relayed the story to me.
Inside was a dead guy… no surprise, since I was a deputy medical examiner and for me to be called to any residence someone nearby had to be dead.
Fortunately, it was easy to stay poker-faced since the dead guy’s story was far more common than I think anyone could realize. The guy had been unemployed and living in that house with his mother for the last 10 years. While the other kids would come by and check to make sure everyone was still breathing, no one had actually entered the residence in over a decade. The mother had suffered a debilitating stroke a month ago and was moved to a local nursing home. The son, our dead guy, was being evicted from the house since he couldn’t afford the rent without his mother’s social security. Keeping with tradition, his sister had come by almost daily to make sure he was okay, but never actually came into the house. She would pull up to the end of the driveway in her car and honk. Then her brother would come out and give her a status update. She would remind him that he needed to get the house packed up, and that would be that. Except this last time, she pulled up and honked her horn, but no one came out.
The officer went on to tell me that the guy had a history of drug use, and at least 2 overdoses under his belt prior to this… the incident which we sanitized by calling it his "terminal event" as opposed to his "latest and greatest adventure with controlled substances" or his "epic fail" or his "personal quest for room temperature."
The officer, who apparently had not yet learned the "straight face" lesson, emphasized with a wide eyed grimace, "It’s REALLY bad in there!"
I had been eyeing the doorknob and suspected he was right. Doorknobs are one of the first things I evaluate when I enter a house. I’ve come to realize that the degree of filth inside a residence is directly proportional to the diameter of the greasy stain that halo-es the doorknob…. The dirt and oil from unknown years of comings and goings. The residue from people's hands deposits grime around the doorknob- even just the slightest touch of a clean hand- will leave something. If people don't clean it off, or stop cleaning it off- or don’t wash their hands, all that crap collects around the doorknob like rings in a tree stump. This guy had the equivalent of a California Redwood smeared on his door.
I took a deep breath, realizing it might be the last whiff of fresh air I may catch for a few hours, and swung the door open.
I entered the home with the officer hovering behind me, waiting for my expletive.
I’m relieved to say, that while the house was, in fact, disgusting… I have seen much, much worse. Additionally, while our dead guy was undoubtedly past his expiration date, he was NOT the most decomposed body I’ve ever examined… not even close. The most decomposed body I’ve ever had to examine had long since re-discovered his role in the food chain and was the unwitting benefactor for approximately 10 generations of maggots and blow-flies. This guy, at least, still looked vaguely human.
I resisted the urge to rib the officer for exaggerating. He was obviously new at the job and, by the look of him, barely old enough to buy beer. In fact, I couldn’t help but suspect his crisp, stiff uniform had been rendered so by his mother whom he likely still lived with. I’ve never known a guy in his twenties to look so "pressed" without help. That’s something you notice when you work with the police a great deal, you stop seeing the uniform and start seeing the people underneath them- and you realize how young a lot of these beat cops really are… adolescents paying their dues.
As I stepped into the littered front foyer, the boy-sheriff and I were greeted by a sergeant who had been inside, herding the decedent’s berserk dogs into the garage. The house was not so much hoarded as it was trashed. Clearly the guy would have been a hoarder, if he’d had more stuff to hoard. He had gotten as far into the "packing up" process as he could before clearly giving up and opting to instead take a handful of his mother’s leftover morphine tablets before he passed out on the living room floor.
There were empty book-shelves and drawers, positioned haphazardly about the house with all the contents spread out all over the floor. Other furniture was tipped on it’s side. It appeared as though the guy knew these things needed to be taken out of their respective locations and packed up, but he forgot to locate any boxes in which to pack them. Each bedroom contained a bare mattress, piles of clothes, newspapers, shoes… and animal feces… everywhere you looked. The entire residence had been turned into a giant cat-box, and before you could sneeze and scratch at the hives forming on your face from being exposed to such a mess… the cats themselves began floating to the surface.
I was in the master bedroom, sifting through a pile of blue-jeans with a pair of barbecue tongs I had found on the mattress when I spotted the first cat… staring at me quizzically from it’s perch on an over-turned 5-gallon bucket. But it wasn’t a cat… it was a kitten.
I don’t like cats, as a rule. First of all I’m allergic to them. Secondly, cats are neurotic, unpredictable schizophrenics who don’t have owners as much as they have staff. I tend to like animals that like me back (which may explain my ability to attract gamers, musicians and other fringe personalities.) Kittens, on the other hand, are a horse of a different color. There is very little in this world as endearing and loveable as a kitten. The sudden presence of that fluffy little face completely derailed my death investigation, and the next thing you know, my hunt for the dead guy’s driver’s license in order to establish positive identification was completely abandoned in favor of finding something shiny and fascinating to dangle in front of the kitten's face.
"Hey guys… there are KITTENS." I squealed to the officers who were, likewise, tossing the other bedrooms on a hunt for the missing license.
"Yeah, I know," the sergeant called back to me, "I’ve spotted at least two so far."
"Oh my GOD, they are SOOOOOOOOOO cute!" I cooed, extending my hand to the little black scamp, who was having nothing of it and leapt off the bucket, dashing back into the living room. I followed, deciding that the dead guy leaving his driver’s license in his mother’s bedroom made about as much sense as keeping a pair of barbecue tongs on the mattress.
"I didn’t find anything." The younger officer said to me as he joined me in the living room. We both watched as one large cat, presumably the brood’s mother, wandered out of her home in the dilapidated entertainment center and stood before us with an expectant, almost polite, gaze.
"Terribly sorry about the state of the place," she seemed to say "I don’t suppose any of you could be troubled to feed us?"
I tried to refocus as the police officers went outside to question the family about tattoos and scars for identification purposes. I pulled out my camera and addressed the stiff and bloated gentleman laying on the living room floor. With each "click" of my camera as I photographed our decedent, another kitten meandered into the room to observe me at work. When I looked up, I had no less than 4 kittens, either lounging on the overturned television, or tip-toeing closer to me and the dead body to determine what was so fascinating about the stiff who had been lying on the floor for at least 4 days and was officially old-news in their opinion. I couldn’t help myself.
Click- and I had an adorable rendering of a kitten wrestling with the empty morphine bottle.
Click- and I had a darling photograph of a tiny calico kitten tentatively sniffing the out-streched, rigored hand of the corpse.
Click- and I had a desk-top worthy pic of the little black kitten demurely seated on the dead guy’s chest with her tail curled around her feet-
The more photos I took, the more the kittens seemed to enjoy the whole "Kittens with Corpses" theme we had going on.
Eventually, the police came back in, and I had to be a little more… tactful with my photography. But I still collected a slew of pictures of the kittens climbing the filthy kitchen counter, batting around loose morphine tablets in the bathroom and I captured a particularly endearing photo of the kittens swatting at the sergeant’s radio as he waved the antennae in front of them.
We all had to thoroughly compose ourselves when we left the house to address the family about our findings. It was the first time I ever ad to employ the "keep a straight face" tactic because I’d had so much damnned fun.
Furthermore, I had to resist the urge to ask the family if I could take one of them home with me… but I couldn’t imagine how I’d explain to my husband (who’s ALSO allergic to cats) how I came to return from a death scene with a little black kitten that smelled like decomp.
"Please baby, can’t we keep him?" I heard myself begging, "he’s not just a kitten… he’s a CADAVER kitten."
I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to my boss why all of my scene photos prominently feature a corpse, heavily decorated with kittens. But honestly, what are they going to say? Everyone at the scene was much more at ease due to the kitten factor. I think my own hard edged demeanor may have been dulled a bit due to the fact that I had spent most of my time "frolicking" through the scene instead of "trudging" through it. Maybe we can talk finance into investing in a crate of kittens for the deputy medical examiners and sheriffs' officers. I think there would be a lot fewer complaints. Imagine it:
"Well, at first I was kind of offended by all the questions the medical examiner was asking me about my husband's death... things like, 'did he ever use recreational substances' or 'Did he have a history of depression or suicide attempts.' I was GOING to complain... but.. you know... she had that kitten with her..."
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The Hope Diamond
The Hope Diamond
I got another one of those calls.
The "effects" call: A crazed voice on the other end of the line- DEMANDING that I produce the a decedent’s lucky purple disposable lighter, or their $1.99 digital pro-wrestling watch they got from the sale bin at Wal-Mart , or the receipt from their last trip to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. It sounds silly, but it’s true. We medical examiners are frequently asked to answer for the location of virtually any and every item under the sun. Because, when someone’s loved one dies… every item that loved one ever TOUCHED suddenly becomes a holy relic- something to be collected and hoarded, treasured and protected. There’s an example of this behavior in the movie "Ghost". Demi Moore plays a woman who’s long-time lover dies. In one, particular scene, she’s going through his belongings with a friend and insists to the friend that she’s sentimentally attached to AND really wants to keep his half-empty package of Rolaids. To someone unfamiliar with grieving people, this scene may appear to be an exaggeration. But let me assure you, the scene is painfully accurate.
One of my favorite saying is, "death brings out the crazy in people".
It’s true. You may tell me that you believe a particular person is smart, well-adjusted, level-headed and realistic. I’ll tell you: "Just wait until their Mama dies."
People have violent reactions to death, convulsive reactions. To a lot of people, death is like food poisoning, or an allergy. They reject it, dramatically, the same way their circulatory system would reject an incompatible blood type being pumped into their veins, the same way their stomach would reject a bowlful of spoiled mayonnaise. They cannot… WILL NOT… accept it- that death is a fact, a certainty and there’s no arguing with it or no denying it. Once it happens, it’s done and there’s no taking it back. In their desperation to adapt to this sudden and sometimes violent separation, they become frantic, frenzied, suspicious and intolerably grabby. And it never fails, they will consistently ask you to produce the most inane, worthless, random piece of crap… and they will convince themselves that THAT item is the hook that their sanity hangs upon- they will loose all their memories of their precious uncle or darling grandfather unless they have his plastic pill-case to cling to in their solitude. They would be able to accept the death of their brother or cousin, they would be able to process it and move on if they ONLY had his wallet that he made out of duct-tape 3 years ago.
I’ve had a lot of people die in my life- and having dealt with death so often, I would like to say that I take it better than most, but I can’t be sure. For all I know, I might punch my crazy ticket and go for a sail on the USS Bat-Shit just like everyone else. Because who can really tell? I don’t think anyone can adequately judge how appropriate or inappropriate their requests or demands are when they’re elbow deep in grief. This is why I think I end up with so many calls about effects. Sad people just don’t realize how ridiculous they’re being when they call up and insist that we have some trinket that belonged to the decedent. Seriously, the things people ask for would amaze you. And no matter how ludicrous the query, you have to take it seriously and talk to them as though you completely agree with their belief that having the shredded pair of jeans that the paramedics cut off their husband in the ambulance WILL, in fact, magically bring a shard of his soul back from the hereafter.
You do your best to understanding, to be sympathetic, but sometimes people are downright irrational and ask me to produce items that they’re not even sure the decedent owned. I once had a family member call and command that I account for the whereabouts of her dead nephew’s Rolex…
"Ummm, Ma’am, we secured the residence after his death. NO ONE has been in there since his death and he was not WEARING a Rolex when he died."
"Well," she huffed, "I KNOW he HAD a Rolex SOMEWHERE. He loved that watch, he guarded it with his life and it isn’t anywhere in his apartment. I want to know what YOU’RE going to do about it."
Well,
"Uhhhh, okay. When’s the last time you remember seeing the watch?" I asked her
She stuttered.
"When’s the last time you saw your nephew?"
"I don’t know, maybe 7 or 8 years ago…"
"Okay, when you last spoke to your nephew, did he mention the watch- talk about still having it? Mention he was wearing it… anything?"
"Well… no."
I told her she could file a police report if she wanted, but since no one ever saw this Rolex and we couldn’t confirm that the decedent still owned it, or EVER owned it, we were not going to be replacing it, or reimbursing them for the cost of a Rolex. She told me she just wanted all of this business to be over with because she was leaving for Tahiti next week and didn’t want to be distracted by such matters.
In addition, it seems the more estranged two relatives are, the more crazed the surviving party will be about collecting the sum total of the decedent’s worldly possessions. I once had to navigate the volatile resentments of two sisters who hadn’t spoken in over 30 years. When the surviving sister was located and given access to the dead sister’s residence, she called us up and began freaking out about all of the family heirlooms the dead sister allegedly had custody of… but now could not be found. The possibility that these heirlooms had either been lost, given away or sold over the course of the last 30 years didn’t even seem to cross her mind. In her estimation, it was our job to see to it that she received EVERYTHING her dead sister ever owned… EVER
And despite my long-standing belief that I attract crazy like blood attracts sharks, I know for a fact that my experiences are by no means unique. Every now and then I’ll be forced to call up Tanya and see if she, perhaps, knows the whereabouts of a necklace or a ring that a decedent from one of her cases was allegedly wearing when they took the nap of no return. And Tanya always answers the same:
"Oh, for fuck sake… did the Hope Diamond go missing again?"
Furthermore, Henry, my other co-worker, has been in this business for decades, and due to the sheer number of cases he’s had, his stories always win the "What the hell" contest. He truly has seen and heard it all. There is a family of one of Henry’s decedent’s who calls every year, on the anniversary of his death. They apparently always ask for Henry, and when they get him, they very pointedly ask if he is ready to give back Uncle Pablo’s watch yet. Henry has told them every year that he doesn’t have the watch, and never did. But it seems they don’t believe Henry and have decided to wear him down, confident that one day his conscience will get the better of him and he will return this watch. Last I asked Henry, the yearly phone call was a couple of months late, meaning they either gave up, forgot, or finally found the watch stuffed in a drawer somewhere and were too sheepish to admit they were wrong.
But my favorite of Henry’s stories didn’t happen here, it happened way up in the mountains where he worked for a very rural community- the kind where supplies had to be flown in and out. Well, on this one particular evening, the plane didn’t make it. A passenger/cargo plane crashed into the local pond, killing 5 people… which in a small mountain community, can constitute a pretty hefty percentage of the population. Logistically, the investigation and clean up of the plane crash was a stress laced fiasco of epic proportions. And right in the middle of it- she appeared, some woman from the town who had apparently been waiting for the arrival of a very special individual on that crashed plane.
To hear Henry tell it, she stomped her way into the Coroner’s office, in the midst of shattered families and heartbroken friends, and she demanded to know where her vacuum was.
It seems she had purchased the appliance new and when some aspect of it failed to function properly, she sent it back to the manufacturer for warranty repairs. The manufacturer had shipped it back, and it had allegedly been on the plane when it went down… and she wanted it back. She wouldn’t take "no" for an answer, as Henry said. She also wouldn’t take, "Are you out of your goddammned mind?" for an answer either. This lady had insisted that in the process of retrieving the bodies from the plane wreckage- someone go down there and get her vacum out of that cargo hold. Henry wasn’t altogether sure how she landed on the conclusion that getting the vacuum back was the responsibility of the coroner’s office- since the vacuum, though a victim of the catastrophe, could not qualify as a dead body… nor did it even qualify as a dead person’s effects, since the vacuum had been travelling unaccompanied and the owner was very much alive and well AND demanding that someone do something about the loss of her vacuum in this terrible, terrible tragedy.
"You guys were RIGHT THERE!" She allegedly barked at the retrieval crew who had been fishing the human remains out of the pond. "You were right THERE! Why didn't you grab my vacum?"
As the story goes she attempted to sue the county government for the price of her vacum- since clearly, it was the fault of the coroner's office that the device was languishing in the bottom of the pond. And, once again, when all her claims went unheeded and her continued pleas for the vacum's rescue were denied... she mounted a one-woman campaign to achieve justice for her cause. According to Henry, this woman called, wrote letters, stopped by... any avenue of contact she could concieve of- she did so for YEARS. And always, she levied the same complaint: Someone owed her a vacum, goddamnnit- and she meant to have that vacum, even if collecting on that debt took the rest of her life.
Okay... so SHE'S a bad example. But her dedication to an inanimate object, and her crazed refusal to just let it go... are not unusual.
Death brings out the crazy in people. LOSS beings out the crazy in people.
I suppose I'm no better. I have a black courderoy shirt that I don’t particularly like and will probably never wear, but I keep it because it belonged to an old friend of mine who died... a death that... still touches me with it's frostbitten fingers... still runs it's hands along the contours of my throat, before gripping and squeezing until I can hardly wrestle a single strangled tear from my eyes. I miss him. I can't shake the feeling that our conversation just wasn't over yet. And some part of me still needs that shirt. Even in my most desperate, tiny-closet-have-to-get-rid-of-everything moments, I have refused to part with it. Even when I was moving for the 3 time in a year and shedding belongings like a collie sheds hair, I still never parted with that shirt.
Earrings
False teeth
Key-rings
Pocket knives
Hair clips
Even me- after having emptied out my husband's jeans a million times at the washing machine, I know what he carries on his person at all times... and if something were to happen to him, I can't promise I wouldn’t merrily bludgeon anyone who dared stand between me and his half-used tube of lip-balm.
So, I guess what I’m saying is… I get it- kinda. I understand that when we are faced with the irreversible departure of someone we expected to see around for another day or month or year… or decade, we cling to evidence of their existence… Like we have to prove to ourselves that they were really here, because their sudden absence can be so harsh, so brutal, so unexpected and final. I hear it a lot from people: "How can someone be here one minute and the next they’re just GONE?" Just knowing they were real isn’t enough. Our senses need to participate in the memory…
Things may change. I may become more and more jaded with every pair of reading glasses I’m told I have to locate. I may just get flat out sick of toting around the random crap that reminds me my dead friends really inhabited physical space at one point. And I have no doubt I will spend plenty of time getting the run-around from Next-of-Kin who will erroneously accuse me of pinching wildly valuable crap their grandfather couldn’t possibly have owned. But for now, I have Tony’s black courderoy shirt hanging, unworn, in my closet. I have my grandfather’s blue cardigan sweater, the impossibly scratchy one that I cannot STAND to put on, it’s curled up in my bottom drawer. And if you tell me that, upon her death, your mother was wearing the plastic mood ring she bought in Venice Beach in 1964… it’s irreplaceable to you, you are devastated and incomplete without it…
…well…
…I suppose I better get to hunting for your Hope diamond.
I got another one of those calls.
The "effects" call: A crazed voice on the other end of the line- DEMANDING that I produce the a decedent’s lucky purple disposable lighter, or their $1.99 digital pro-wrestling watch they got from the sale bin at Wal-Mart , or the receipt from their last trip to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. It sounds silly, but it’s true. We medical examiners are frequently asked to answer for the location of virtually any and every item under the sun. Because, when someone’s loved one dies… every item that loved one ever TOUCHED suddenly becomes a holy relic- something to be collected and hoarded, treasured and protected. There’s an example of this behavior in the movie "Ghost". Demi Moore plays a woman who’s long-time lover dies. In one, particular scene, she’s going through his belongings with a friend and insists to the friend that she’s sentimentally attached to AND really wants to keep his half-empty package of Rolaids. To someone unfamiliar with grieving people, this scene may appear to be an exaggeration. But let me assure you, the scene is painfully accurate.
One of my favorite saying is, "death brings out the crazy in people".
It’s true. You may tell me that you believe a particular person is smart, well-adjusted, level-headed and realistic. I’ll tell you: "Just wait until their Mama dies."
People have violent reactions to death, convulsive reactions. To a lot of people, death is like food poisoning, or an allergy. They reject it, dramatically, the same way their circulatory system would reject an incompatible blood type being pumped into their veins, the same way their stomach would reject a bowlful of spoiled mayonnaise. They cannot… WILL NOT… accept it- that death is a fact, a certainty and there’s no arguing with it or no denying it. Once it happens, it’s done and there’s no taking it back. In their desperation to adapt to this sudden and sometimes violent separation, they become frantic, frenzied, suspicious and intolerably grabby. And it never fails, they will consistently ask you to produce the most inane, worthless, random piece of crap… and they will convince themselves that THAT item is the hook that their sanity hangs upon- they will loose all their memories of their precious uncle or darling grandfather unless they have his plastic pill-case to cling to in their solitude. They would be able to accept the death of their brother or cousin, they would be able to process it and move on if they ONLY had his wallet that he made out of duct-tape 3 years ago.
I’ve had a lot of people die in my life- and having dealt with death so often, I would like to say that I take it better than most, but I can’t be sure. For all I know, I might punch my crazy ticket and go for a sail on the USS Bat-Shit just like everyone else. Because who can really tell? I don’t think anyone can adequately judge how appropriate or inappropriate their requests or demands are when they’re elbow deep in grief. This is why I think I end up with so many calls about effects. Sad people just don’t realize how ridiculous they’re being when they call up and insist that we have some trinket that belonged to the decedent. Seriously, the things people ask for would amaze you. And no matter how ludicrous the query, you have to take it seriously and talk to them as though you completely agree with their belief that having the shredded pair of jeans that the paramedics cut off their husband in the ambulance WILL, in fact, magically bring a shard of his soul back from the hereafter.
You do your best to understanding, to be sympathetic, but sometimes people are downright irrational and ask me to produce items that they’re not even sure the decedent owned. I once had a family member call and command that I account for the whereabouts of her dead nephew’s Rolex…
"Ummm, Ma’am, we secured the residence after his death. NO ONE has been in there since his death and he was not WEARING a Rolex when he died."
"Well," she huffed, "I KNOW he HAD a Rolex SOMEWHERE. He loved that watch, he guarded it with his life and it isn’t anywhere in his apartment. I want to know what YOU’RE going to do about it."
Well,
"Uhhhh, okay. When’s the last time you remember seeing the watch?" I asked her
She stuttered.
"When’s the last time you saw your nephew?"
"I don’t know, maybe 7 or 8 years ago…"
"Okay, when you last spoke to your nephew, did he mention the watch- talk about still having it? Mention he was wearing it… anything?"
"Well… no."
I told her she could file a police report if she wanted, but since no one ever saw this Rolex and we couldn’t confirm that the decedent still owned it, or EVER owned it, we were not going to be replacing it, or reimbursing them for the cost of a Rolex. She told me she just wanted all of this business to be over with because she was leaving for Tahiti next week and didn’t want to be distracted by such matters.
In addition, it seems the more estranged two relatives are, the more crazed the surviving party will be about collecting the sum total of the decedent’s worldly possessions. I once had to navigate the volatile resentments of two sisters who hadn’t spoken in over 30 years. When the surviving sister was located and given access to the dead sister’s residence, she called us up and began freaking out about all of the family heirlooms the dead sister allegedly had custody of… but now could not be found. The possibility that these heirlooms had either been lost, given away or sold over the course of the last 30 years didn’t even seem to cross her mind. In her estimation, it was our job to see to it that she received EVERYTHING her dead sister ever owned… EVER
And despite my long-standing belief that I attract crazy like blood attracts sharks, I know for a fact that my experiences are by no means unique. Every now and then I’ll be forced to call up Tanya and see if she, perhaps, knows the whereabouts of a necklace or a ring that a decedent from one of her cases was allegedly wearing when they took the nap of no return. And Tanya always answers the same:
"Oh, for fuck sake… did the Hope Diamond go missing again?"
Furthermore, Henry, my other co-worker, has been in this business for decades, and due to the sheer number of cases he’s had, his stories always win the "What the hell" contest. He truly has seen and heard it all. There is a family of one of Henry’s decedent’s who calls every year, on the anniversary of his death. They apparently always ask for Henry, and when they get him, they very pointedly ask if he is ready to give back Uncle Pablo’s watch yet. Henry has told them every year that he doesn’t have the watch, and never did. But it seems they don’t believe Henry and have decided to wear him down, confident that one day his conscience will get the better of him and he will return this watch. Last I asked Henry, the yearly phone call was a couple of months late, meaning they either gave up, forgot, or finally found the watch stuffed in a drawer somewhere and were too sheepish to admit they were wrong.
But my favorite of Henry’s stories didn’t happen here, it happened way up in the mountains where he worked for a very rural community- the kind where supplies had to be flown in and out. Well, on this one particular evening, the plane didn’t make it. A passenger/cargo plane crashed into the local pond, killing 5 people… which in a small mountain community, can constitute a pretty hefty percentage of the population. Logistically, the investigation and clean up of the plane crash was a stress laced fiasco of epic proportions. And right in the middle of it- she appeared, some woman from the town who had apparently been waiting for the arrival of a very special individual on that crashed plane.
To hear Henry tell it, she stomped her way into the Coroner’s office, in the midst of shattered families and heartbroken friends, and she demanded to know where her vacuum was.
It seems she had purchased the appliance new and when some aspect of it failed to function properly, she sent it back to the manufacturer for warranty repairs. The manufacturer had shipped it back, and it had allegedly been on the plane when it went down… and she wanted it back. She wouldn’t take "no" for an answer, as Henry said. She also wouldn’t take, "Are you out of your goddammned mind?" for an answer either. This lady had insisted that in the process of retrieving the bodies from the plane wreckage- someone go down there and get her vacum out of that cargo hold. Henry wasn’t altogether sure how she landed on the conclusion that getting the vacuum back was the responsibility of the coroner’s office- since the vacuum, though a victim of the catastrophe, could not qualify as a dead body… nor did it even qualify as a dead person’s effects, since the vacuum had been travelling unaccompanied and the owner was very much alive and well AND demanding that someone do something about the loss of her vacuum in this terrible, terrible tragedy.
"You guys were RIGHT THERE!" She allegedly barked at the retrieval crew who had been fishing the human remains out of the pond. "You were right THERE! Why didn't you grab my vacum?"
As the story goes she attempted to sue the county government for the price of her vacum- since clearly, it was the fault of the coroner's office that the device was languishing in the bottom of the pond. And, once again, when all her claims went unheeded and her continued pleas for the vacum's rescue were denied... she mounted a one-woman campaign to achieve justice for her cause. According to Henry, this woman called, wrote letters, stopped by... any avenue of contact she could concieve of- she did so for YEARS. And always, she levied the same complaint: Someone owed her a vacum, goddamnnit- and she meant to have that vacum, even if collecting on that debt took the rest of her life.
Okay... so SHE'S a bad example. But her dedication to an inanimate object, and her crazed refusal to just let it go... are not unusual.
Death brings out the crazy in people. LOSS beings out the crazy in people.
I suppose I'm no better. I have a black courderoy shirt that I don’t particularly like and will probably never wear, but I keep it because it belonged to an old friend of mine who died... a death that... still touches me with it's frostbitten fingers... still runs it's hands along the contours of my throat, before gripping and squeezing until I can hardly wrestle a single strangled tear from my eyes. I miss him. I can't shake the feeling that our conversation just wasn't over yet. And some part of me still needs that shirt. Even in my most desperate, tiny-closet-have-to-get-rid-of-everything moments, I have refused to part with it. Even when I was moving for the 3 time in a year and shedding belongings like a collie sheds hair, I still never parted with that shirt.
Earrings
False teeth
Key-rings
Pocket knives
Hair clips
Even me- after having emptied out my husband's jeans a million times at the washing machine, I know what he carries on his person at all times... and if something were to happen to him, I can't promise I wouldn’t merrily bludgeon anyone who dared stand between me and his half-used tube of lip-balm.
So, I guess what I’m saying is… I get it- kinda. I understand that when we are faced with the irreversible departure of someone we expected to see around for another day or month or year… or decade, we cling to evidence of their existence… Like we have to prove to ourselves that they were really here, because their sudden absence can be so harsh, so brutal, so unexpected and final. I hear it a lot from people: "How can someone be here one minute and the next they’re just GONE?" Just knowing they were real isn’t enough. Our senses need to participate in the memory…
Things may change. I may become more and more jaded with every pair of reading glasses I’m told I have to locate. I may just get flat out sick of toting around the random crap that reminds me my dead friends really inhabited physical space at one point. And I have no doubt I will spend plenty of time getting the run-around from Next-of-Kin who will erroneously accuse me of pinching wildly valuable crap their grandfather couldn’t possibly have owned. But for now, I have Tony’s black courderoy shirt hanging, unworn, in my closet. I have my grandfather’s blue cardigan sweater, the impossibly scratchy one that I cannot STAND to put on, it’s curled up in my bottom drawer. And if you tell me that, upon her death, your mother was wearing the plastic mood ring she bought in Venice Beach in 1964… it’s irreplaceable to you, you are devastated and incomplete without it…
…well…
…I suppose I better get to hunting for your Hope diamond.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Small Talk
I never expected to work in an office, and to be fair, I DON’T actually work in an office.
I work wherever the dead are found, which means I work in hospitals, in homes, in businesses and sometimes, I work in the street.
However, I am expected to be seen in an office from time to time.
Here, in Oswald county, The Deputy Medical Examiner’s office falls under the umbrella of the “Health and Human Services” department. This means we share office space with the folks who handle birth-certificates, health inspections, restaurant licensing… all kinds of civil services that service humans. I’m not sure who decided that the Medical Examiners were part of health and human services, I’m guessing they didn’t know what else to do with us… which is fine… people feel that way about me quite a bit.
The up side of this arrangement is I have a secretarial staff that answers the phone for me during business hours. I always feel kind of giddy when I instruct them to “hold my calls”, simply because I never expected to be professionally important enough to call. The downside of this arrangement is the time I spend in the office is time spent around people who have absolutely no idea what my job entails or the kind of personality quirks it tends to evoke.
For example- I am normally on shift for a stretch of 48 hours. This means that sometimes when I come into the office at 8am to print out case files or file some scene photos… I am not actually starting my work-day. It’s entirely possible that my work-day started at 1am and I have been on the scene of a house-fire for the last 7 hours. Or I have been taking death-reports from the local hospital all night. It’s times like these that inevitably, someone will approach me with a completely inane question or want to carry on a conversation regarding some matter that I, in that moment, find existentially painful and completely fucking pointless.
Perhaps most tragically, in these instances, I find myself completely incapable of small-talk, especially the kind of disinterested drivel that office workers consider “standard” or “polite”. Such conversation actually makes me actively hostile when I’ve recently spent a significant amount of time either slogging through human decomposition, or trying to manage particularly difficult family members on the scene of their son’s shotgun suicide. When set against these experiences, office chat turns to mealy, rotten apple pulp in my mouth and I simply can’t stand it.
The remedy to this problem is, of course, to spend as little time in the office as possible. After all, we aren’t required to be in the office during regular office hours, we are only required to get our filing done and show up at any death worthy of investigation. But I have noted that the less time I spend in the office, the more people want to talk to me when I AM there. They spy me in the lunch room or using the copier and realize they either have no idea who I am… or they realize they haven’t seen me in a while. These circumstances result in me being cornered by a well-intentioned "peer" who wants to discuss the latest episode of “Glee” and who has no idea I just had to yank the body of a dead child out of his disbelieving mother’s arms. These well-intentioned co-workers have no idea how close they are to suffering fatal stab wounds when they do this. Consequently, I’m reputed to possess a particularly prickly and surly disposition.
The other day, at 8am, I was in the kitchen pouring my 6th cup of coffee since midnight. I had spent most of the night wrestling with a man who had diedof a drug overdose roughly a week earlier. The forensic pathologist I had consulted from the scene had instructed me to procure a urine sample for toxicological analysis. This involved wrestling the dead man’s pants down to his ankles and jamming an 8-inch long needle into his abdomen in the hopes of puncturing his bladder. It took forever because the man was obese and evidently had a bladder the size of an acorn. Furthermore, he had voided as a result of his death, and so his trousers were still slightly damp with week-old urine. Now, one hour and NO SHOWER later, I was standing in the office kitchen, considering my job skills and wondering at the likelihood of getting hired as a flight attendant. A professionally dressed, middle-aged woman meandered into the kitchen and began rooting through the fridge. Having retrieved her bagel and cream-cheese, she straightened up and regarded me with curiosity. I could tell she was trying to recall if she’d met me before and seemed to be aiming her “I’m-going-to-make-pleasant-conversation-with-you” gun right at me. Yet, when I did not turn and look back at her, she hesitated… considered…
“Go on… go on!” I silently challenged her. “Go ahead… just ASK me how I’m doing today, I DARE YOU!”
I’m not sure how fiercely I was exuding hostility, but my angry mojo apparently overcame her desire to be sociable, because she surrendered without a word and scurried back out of the kitchen to the safety of her cubicle.
I was a little disappointed and yet relieved at the time... the way someone playing Russian-roulette feels when the gun fails to fire. In retrospect, I have to admit that everyone involved was very fortunate that she didn’t attempt to carry on a dialogue with me. Had she done so… had she decided to throw caution to the wind and ask me the standard, “How are you today?” I had every diabolical intention of leveling my most sociopathic gaze on her and answering:
“I smell like dead-men’s piss”
I’m not sure if I would have actually been disciplined for responding in this way, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have done anything good for my reputation. And let’s face it, when you move to a new town and start a new job, you kind of need to get along with people at work. Often, they’re the only folks you have any reason to talk to and human contact is good for humans- especially when you work for health and human services. Besides, it didn’t take me long to find a kindred spirit at the office. My cubicle is right next to that of the woman who takes food-poisoning complaints from people who want to blame the restaurant they recently patronized. The first time I heard her bellowing over the phone to a frantic, enraged voice on the other end of the line:
“Sir… SIR- how long have you had the explosive diarrhea?”
… I knew we’d get along just fine.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Are You Gonna Eat That?
One of my favorite television series is called “Firelfy”.
Don’t bother looking for it on prime-time. It’s been cancelled.
But it’s a good show, a funny, poignant and philosophical science-fiction delight. I bring this up because in one of the episodes, one of the ensemble characters is talking about death. They have a dead body that they’re transporting in their space-ship, and this guy is furiously lifting weights and exercising like a maniac. He comments that whenever he finds himself in close proximity to death, any death, he feels an overwhelming urge to move around. He states that he wants to go run or fight or even have sex if there’s a willing woman around. And the character that he’s speaking to comments that it’s probably a subconscious reaction to the idea of death- this desire to immerse one’s self in life-affirming, life-sustaining activity- something that really makes you feel animated.
I experience this phenomenon myself. I suppose everyone that deals with death has some kind of deeply visceral reaction to it that manifests in different ways. I would suspect that for some people, their reaction is so subtle that even they aren’t aware of it. And for still others, they're such wizened veterans… their experiences with death are so numerous, they’ve probably managed to eradicate their reactions completely… or at least water them down to a nervous tic or tiny habit.
As for me, I don’t suddenly feel inspired to go for a run or power lift. I don’t go looking to pick a fight in a bar, and much to the disappointment of my darling husband, I don’t get insatiably horny. Instead- I get hungry… really REALLY hungry.
I’ve heard it said (and I think that Brad Pitt’s character might have implied something to the same effect in “Fight Club”) that after a near death experience, the first food a person eats is said to be the most scrumptious fare, the most satisfying meal they have ever had in their entire life. And seeing as how I have upwards of five near-death experiences on any given work-day (near-death as in I’m actually in the physical proximity of death- not that my life is incessantly being threatened) I can confirm that this theory is entirely correct. I after I go to scene, I am so freakin’ hungry I could single-handedly close-down a Hometown Buffet in one night.
What’s worse- the more gruesome the death, the more voracious I become… and the more unnerved everyone else is when I emerge from a dead guy’s bedroom with blood all over my hands and announce that I’m famished and wouldn’t we all just KILL for a moon-pie right this very second? I’d hate to think of what would happen if I ever went on a plane crash- notoriously the most heinous carnage one could ever witness. I’d probably start picking through the scorched remains of the food carts and wondering if just a little jet fuel in your pre-packaged salad is REALLY all that toxic. I discovered this delightful little facet of my “problem” once when I was coming away from a “decomp” (a scene in which the body had been untended to for a few days and had actively started rotting- sorry for the visual) and for the life of me, all I wanted on God’s green earth, was an order of French fries. I mean it, I was INTENT. Nevermind the fact that I had dead-man goo on the bottoms of my shoes and I smelled as though I lived in the bottom of a trash-can at Denny’s. When I finally achieved my fries, every bite was like a salty, golden miracle in my mouth. Each crispy, oily fry was the best goddamned day of my life. Mmmmmmm- French fries.
This quirk- this… coping mechanism, if you will, is manageable. Of course I have to do enough exercise in a single day to burn about 3-times my body weight in calories… and that’s just to maintain my current poundage. If, for any reason, I couldn’t get enough cardio for a while, I’d be a candidate for “The Biggest Looser” in less than a month… I mean really, my daily caloric intake is staggering, bordering on shameful.
I would say the biggest problem with this whole issue of mine is that I really want to eat dead people’s food.
Seriously, it’s SO not okay. You can’t even SEE the land of okay from the location of this behavior on the moral spectrum. This behavior is town square in the worst neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks… from “okay”.
“What’s the big deal.” You might be thinking… of if you’re not thinking THAT, you’re thinking: “Jeez Grace, that’s really gross.” And you’d probably have a point on both counts… let me ‘splain.
As a Deputy Medical Examiner, I HAVE TO be above reproach when it comes to the belongings, or “effects” of my decedents. It’s my job to see to it that their stuff- whether that stuff consists of a dirty back-pack or a million-dollar penthouse- is secured. I’m the night-watchman, basically. I lock the door and I hold the keys until the dead person’s belongings are either collected by the family- or are relinquished to state-lands for liquidation. Making sure that no one steals the car, rifles through the house or, yes, even steals a hostess twinkie… is my responsibility. And once you open yourself up to the temptation, to even the most innocuous and seemingly innocent slip, once you breach those walls- well I don’t know what happens, since I haven’t done it yet. But I have done enough really fucked-up shit in my life to know that, often, granting yourself permission to commit a single act of even the slightest moral ambiguity, opens the doors for you to do it again… and again… and again. The biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life were not solitary deeds. They were a series of seemingly inane little choices, tiny surrenders, that built up and snowballed into truly deplorable acts. So I don’t eat dead people’s food… the cup-cake stops here.
Sadly, though, I’m still powerfully tempted to do so. It’s funny, I could walk into a mansion, literally carpeted with $100 bills and it wouldn’t even cross my mind to reach down and pocket one of them. But when I walk into a home with a big bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on the coffee table, I fear for my immortal soul. Holidays are the worst, when you rifle through a decedent’s kitchen looking for medications and you find your dead guy was the recent recipient of a Christmas gift basket and there’s a poor-man’s fortune in gourmet cheese and summer-sausage spread across the counter-top. Recently, I was dispatched to a case in which a little old lady was fiddling with her dialysis shunt.* She dislodged the bandaging over the device and ended up exsanguinating with a truly impressive degree of enthusiasm pizzazz. (For those of you NOT medically inclined, it means she bled to death, but did so in a spectacular fashion.) For starters, this woman had high blood pressure and she was also on blood thinners… when you match those two factors with an artificial port directly into her central circulation that can easily be opened… what you get… is modern art. As soon as this lady started bleeding- and I mean BLEEDING, she sprinted a couple of laps around her apartment, decorating the walls with the blood spray that probably had a radius of 2-3 feet. At some point she had apparently decided to go running out into the hallway to seek out assistance, and in doing so, had left blood spatter all over the hallway walls and, obligingly, also smeared large quantities of it on the doors and door-frames of her nearest neighbors. When I surveyed the scene, I couldn’t tell if it was a horror movie or an Old Testament re-enactment of Passover. But, what’s REALLY disturbing is the fact that despite the magnificent bloodbath on display before me, I couldn’t help but note that, at the time, Valentine’s Day was coming up and some generous soul had given our dead lady a GIGANTIC box of assorted chocolates. What’s more, the undeniable sadness and stomach-turning brutality of the scene did nothing to assuage my sudden, voracious appetite. Instead, the situation almost seemed to amplify my compulsion to quietly shut the door to the woman’s room and commence shoveling caramel-nut clusters into my pockets.
(I know it sounds as though I’m being glib- but my own attitude was nothing shocking compared to that of the dead lady’s daughter in law. “I know it’s a tragedy,” she admitted to me over the phone, ”But I have to say, she WAS something of a drama-queen and I think this is probably the way she would have wanted to die… you know… causing the biggest scene possible.” I couldn’t agree more, I, myself, have already decided that if I don’t get to be a cadaver on a dissecting table –thus fulfilling my dream to go to medical school in SOME capacity- I would prefer to die in a manner that leaves behind an astonishing mess.)
But by far, the biggest test of me resolve was probably the dead man’s doughnuts.
I’m not a huge doughnut eater…
… of course I’m not a petite doughnut eater either.
If they’re around and they’re free, I’ll eat doughnuts.
I suppose THAT was the crux of my struggle with the doughnuts- they were there- and for the most part, they could have qualified as “free”.
The dearly departed proprietor of the doughnuts in question had been found unresponsive in his bed after the managers of his apartment complex had failed to see him around for a couple of days. They sent the maintenance man into his apartment to check on him- and the maintenance man discovered that the guy had laid down to take his eternal nap. All things considered, the whole situation was entirely unremarkable and easy to manage. The body had not yet begun it’s slow, slippery slide into decomposition. The apartment was clean. The decedent’s family was out of state, but easily contacted. The only glitch was that our guy was a little young-ish to have died of natural causes (48-years-old). Various unmarked pill bottles and drug paraphernalia had been discovered in the residence. It was a clear-cut case of natural causes vs. overdose.
When I arrived at the dead guy’s apartment, I was greeted at the door by a female deputy sheriff. She greeted me cheerfully and flipping open her note-pad, began to read off the details of our decedent’s situation. She was brisk, but not bitchy. She was clearly serious about her job, but not so much so that she was devoid of the sense of humor that is, quite honestly, CRUCIAL when crisis management is one’s profession. The two of us got to chatting as we worked our way through the dead guy’s apartment. She marveled at his C.D. collection and obligingly used her i-phone to look up the identity of some of the tablets we were finding throughout the house. I found myself liking her, and I was relieved that I was on a scene with someone who could adequately balance an easy-going demeanor with clipped competency.
We entered the kitchen… and I saw them. Sitting on the dead guy’s counter-top was a clear, plastic container of glazed doughnuts. I’m not sure if it was the lighting, the naked, unobstructed presentation of the pastries, or if it was just my personal little glitch scratching at that primal-appetite center in my brain-stem. Regardless of the reason, in that moment, I was convinced that those doughnuts had to be the most perfect glazed doughnuts in all Christendom. Those doughnuts were the pinnacle of all doughnut-dom. Those doughnuts were the platonic form of which all other doughnuts were mere shadows. I had to have one.
“Hm,” I said to the officer, as casually as I could. “doughnuts….”
She looked over at the counter.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “And Oreos too.”
Oreos? I was so enamored of the doughnuts… so entranced by their mouth-watering plump-ness and iridescent sugary-shimmer that I didn’t even notice the unopened bag of double-stuffed Oreos positioned behind the objects of my own lust.
“You know…” I said, again, as offhandedly as possible. “When I come into a dead person’s house, there could be a stack of diamonds on the dining room table and I wouldn’t even glance at them, but … I tell ya… Show me a bowl of fruit or big ‘ol box of doughnuts…..” my voice trailed off, I stared at the doughnuts and shook my head, then glanced back at the officer.
Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and I was certain she was about to utter something to the effect of: “Ew!”
“Oh my GOD! I’m the same way!” she gasped.
And the next thing you knew both of us had completely forgotten about all of the investigating we were supposed to be doing, forgotten about the mason-jars full of weed on the coffee table, forgotten about the dead body in the next room. Instead were comparing stories of the hungriest we’ve ever been at a scene and what we had to talk ourselves OUT of eating:
“…I’m telling you, the entire bedroom was LITTERED with Ghiradelli chocolate-raspberry squares… I wanted to eat one SOOOOOOOOOO bad….”
“… the entire pantry was STUFFED with bags of Doritos…”
“… a plate of chocolate-chip cookies just SITTING THERE by the oven…”
“… more gourmet granola bars than any human really has the right to own…”
We were so delighted by our mutual vice that we were completely unprepared for when the funeral home arrived to collect the decedent’s remains. We had to scramble to get the rest of the scene processed and ultimately admitted to the body-transport guys that the reason we were running behind was because we were distracted by the doughnuts.
The funeral director’s gaze followed our gestures and his breath caught in his throat for a moment.
“Mmmmmmm… doughnuts…” he cooed.
We all knew that the doughnuts were going to be wasted. They guy’s family was out of state and as we had already spoken to them from the apartment, we knew that they would not be coming into town to take care of the dead guy’s affairs for at least a week. By the time they got there, the doughnuts would be stale… if not moldy. Those marvelous doughnuts would be thrown away without a second thought.
Still, none of us actually went for it. Eating a dead person’s food, though not expressly forbidden, is still wildly inappropriate. Probably the only reason there isn’t an actual, written rule against such behavior is because most people who write such rules couldn’t fathom anyone actually wanting to eat a dead man’s doughnuts. All the same, we all exited the apartment with many a backward glance in the direction of the dark kitchen. But ultimately, we left the doughnuts to their lonely fate.
On the upside I came away from that experience feeling a little less freakish about my “problem”. At least now I knew I shared this curse with one other person… a seemingly decent and well adjusted person… a person who I saw the very next day when I was called out to yet another scene in which the decedent had either suffered some kind of natural event or overdosed on narcotics. The deputy sheriff greeted me cordially at the door, and escorted me back to the decedent’s bedroom.
“You’re gonna love this…” she said, throwing the door open and ushering me into the bedroom where our decedent lay slumped over on her bed, surrounded by the evidence of a wicked heroin habit. However, neither of us were looking at the needles, the dirt spoons, the cigarette lighters or the elastic band wrapped around the dead lady’s arm. At that moment neither of us could take our eyes off the night-stand… where there lay a
bright
shiny
un-opened
2-pound bag
Of peanut-butter M&Ms.
Don’t bother looking for it on prime-time. It’s been cancelled.
But it’s a good show, a funny, poignant and philosophical science-fiction delight. I bring this up because in one of the episodes, one of the ensemble characters is talking about death. They have a dead body that they’re transporting in their space-ship, and this guy is furiously lifting weights and exercising like a maniac. He comments that whenever he finds himself in close proximity to death, any death, he feels an overwhelming urge to move around. He states that he wants to go run or fight or even have sex if there’s a willing woman around. And the character that he’s speaking to comments that it’s probably a subconscious reaction to the idea of death- this desire to immerse one’s self in life-affirming, life-sustaining activity- something that really makes you feel animated.
I experience this phenomenon myself. I suppose everyone that deals with death has some kind of deeply visceral reaction to it that manifests in different ways. I would suspect that for some people, their reaction is so subtle that even they aren’t aware of it. And for still others, they're such wizened veterans… their experiences with death are so numerous, they’ve probably managed to eradicate their reactions completely… or at least water them down to a nervous tic or tiny habit.
As for me, I don’t suddenly feel inspired to go for a run or power lift. I don’t go looking to pick a fight in a bar, and much to the disappointment of my darling husband, I don’t get insatiably horny. Instead- I get hungry… really REALLY hungry.
I’ve heard it said (and I think that Brad Pitt’s character might have implied something to the same effect in “Fight Club”) that after a near death experience, the first food a person eats is said to be the most scrumptious fare, the most satisfying meal they have ever had in their entire life. And seeing as how I have upwards of five near-death experiences on any given work-day (near-death as in I’m actually in the physical proximity of death- not that my life is incessantly being threatened) I can confirm that this theory is entirely correct. I after I go to scene, I am so freakin’ hungry I could single-handedly close-down a Hometown Buffet in one night.
What’s worse- the more gruesome the death, the more voracious I become… and the more unnerved everyone else is when I emerge from a dead guy’s bedroom with blood all over my hands and announce that I’m famished and wouldn’t we all just KILL for a moon-pie right this very second? I’d hate to think of what would happen if I ever went on a plane crash- notoriously the most heinous carnage one could ever witness. I’d probably start picking through the scorched remains of the food carts and wondering if just a little jet fuel in your pre-packaged salad is REALLY all that toxic. I discovered this delightful little facet of my “problem” once when I was coming away from a “decomp” (a scene in which the body had been untended to for a few days and had actively started rotting- sorry for the visual) and for the life of me, all I wanted on God’s green earth, was an order of French fries. I mean it, I was INTENT. Nevermind the fact that I had dead-man goo on the bottoms of my shoes and I smelled as though I lived in the bottom of a trash-can at Denny’s. When I finally achieved my fries, every bite was like a salty, golden miracle in my mouth. Each crispy, oily fry was the best goddamned day of my life. Mmmmmmm- French fries.
This quirk- this… coping mechanism, if you will, is manageable. Of course I have to do enough exercise in a single day to burn about 3-times my body weight in calories… and that’s just to maintain my current poundage. If, for any reason, I couldn’t get enough cardio for a while, I’d be a candidate for “The Biggest Looser” in less than a month… I mean really, my daily caloric intake is staggering, bordering on shameful.
I would say the biggest problem with this whole issue of mine is that I really want to eat dead people’s food.
Seriously, it’s SO not okay. You can’t even SEE the land of okay from the location of this behavior on the moral spectrum. This behavior is town square in the worst neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks… from “okay”.
“What’s the big deal.” You might be thinking… of if you’re not thinking THAT, you’re thinking: “Jeez Grace, that’s really gross.” And you’d probably have a point on both counts… let me ‘splain.
As a Deputy Medical Examiner, I HAVE TO be above reproach when it comes to the belongings, or “effects” of my decedents. It’s my job to see to it that their stuff- whether that stuff consists of a dirty back-pack or a million-dollar penthouse- is secured. I’m the night-watchman, basically. I lock the door and I hold the keys until the dead person’s belongings are either collected by the family- or are relinquished to state-lands for liquidation. Making sure that no one steals the car, rifles through the house or, yes, even steals a hostess twinkie… is my responsibility. And once you open yourself up to the temptation, to even the most innocuous and seemingly innocent slip, once you breach those walls- well I don’t know what happens, since I haven’t done it yet. But I have done enough really fucked-up shit in my life to know that, often, granting yourself permission to commit a single act of even the slightest moral ambiguity, opens the doors for you to do it again… and again… and again. The biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life were not solitary deeds. They were a series of seemingly inane little choices, tiny surrenders, that built up and snowballed into truly deplorable acts. So I don’t eat dead people’s food… the cup-cake stops here.
Sadly, though, I’m still powerfully tempted to do so. It’s funny, I could walk into a mansion, literally carpeted with $100 bills and it wouldn’t even cross my mind to reach down and pocket one of them. But when I walk into a home with a big bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on the coffee table, I fear for my immortal soul. Holidays are the worst, when you rifle through a decedent’s kitchen looking for medications and you find your dead guy was the recent recipient of a Christmas gift basket and there’s a poor-man’s fortune in gourmet cheese and summer-sausage spread across the counter-top. Recently, I was dispatched to a case in which a little old lady was fiddling with her dialysis shunt.* She dislodged the bandaging over the device and ended up exsanguinating with a truly impressive degree of enthusiasm pizzazz. (For those of you NOT medically inclined, it means she bled to death, but did so in a spectacular fashion.) For starters, this woman had high blood pressure and she was also on blood thinners… when you match those two factors with an artificial port directly into her central circulation that can easily be opened… what you get… is modern art. As soon as this lady started bleeding- and I mean BLEEDING, she sprinted a couple of laps around her apartment, decorating the walls with the blood spray that probably had a radius of 2-3 feet. At some point she had apparently decided to go running out into the hallway to seek out assistance, and in doing so, had left blood spatter all over the hallway walls and, obligingly, also smeared large quantities of it on the doors and door-frames of her nearest neighbors. When I surveyed the scene, I couldn’t tell if it was a horror movie or an Old Testament re-enactment of Passover. But, what’s REALLY disturbing is the fact that despite the magnificent bloodbath on display before me, I couldn’t help but note that, at the time, Valentine’s Day was coming up and some generous soul had given our dead lady a GIGANTIC box of assorted chocolates. What’s more, the undeniable sadness and stomach-turning brutality of the scene did nothing to assuage my sudden, voracious appetite. Instead, the situation almost seemed to amplify my compulsion to quietly shut the door to the woman’s room and commence shoveling caramel-nut clusters into my pockets.
(I know it sounds as though I’m being glib- but my own attitude was nothing shocking compared to that of the dead lady’s daughter in law. “I know it’s a tragedy,” she admitted to me over the phone, ”But I have to say, she WAS something of a drama-queen and I think this is probably the way she would have wanted to die… you know… causing the biggest scene possible.” I couldn’t agree more, I, myself, have already decided that if I don’t get to be a cadaver on a dissecting table –thus fulfilling my dream to go to medical school in SOME capacity- I would prefer to die in a manner that leaves behind an astonishing mess.)
But by far, the biggest test of me resolve was probably the dead man’s doughnuts.
I’m not a huge doughnut eater…
… of course I’m not a petite doughnut eater either.
If they’re around and they’re free, I’ll eat doughnuts.
I suppose THAT was the crux of my struggle with the doughnuts- they were there- and for the most part, they could have qualified as “free”.
The dearly departed proprietor of the doughnuts in question had been found unresponsive in his bed after the managers of his apartment complex had failed to see him around for a couple of days. They sent the maintenance man into his apartment to check on him- and the maintenance man discovered that the guy had laid down to take his eternal nap. All things considered, the whole situation was entirely unremarkable and easy to manage. The body had not yet begun it’s slow, slippery slide into decomposition. The apartment was clean. The decedent’s family was out of state, but easily contacted. The only glitch was that our guy was a little young-ish to have died of natural causes (48-years-old). Various unmarked pill bottles and drug paraphernalia had been discovered in the residence. It was a clear-cut case of natural causes vs. overdose.
When I arrived at the dead guy’s apartment, I was greeted at the door by a female deputy sheriff. She greeted me cheerfully and flipping open her note-pad, began to read off the details of our decedent’s situation. She was brisk, but not bitchy. She was clearly serious about her job, but not so much so that she was devoid of the sense of humor that is, quite honestly, CRUCIAL when crisis management is one’s profession. The two of us got to chatting as we worked our way through the dead guy’s apartment. She marveled at his C.D. collection and obligingly used her i-phone to look up the identity of some of the tablets we were finding throughout the house. I found myself liking her, and I was relieved that I was on a scene with someone who could adequately balance an easy-going demeanor with clipped competency.
We entered the kitchen… and I saw them. Sitting on the dead guy’s counter-top was a clear, plastic container of glazed doughnuts. I’m not sure if it was the lighting, the naked, unobstructed presentation of the pastries, or if it was just my personal little glitch scratching at that primal-appetite center in my brain-stem. Regardless of the reason, in that moment, I was convinced that those doughnuts had to be the most perfect glazed doughnuts in all Christendom. Those doughnuts were the pinnacle of all doughnut-dom. Those doughnuts were the platonic form of which all other doughnuts were mere shadows. I had to have one.
“Hm,” I said to the officer, as casually as I could. “doughnuts….”
She looked over at the counter.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “And Oreos too.”
Oreos? I was so enamored of the doughnuts… so entranced by their mouth-watering plump-ness and iridescent sugary-shimmer that I didn’t even notice the unopened bag of double-stuffed Oreos positioned behind the objects of my own lust.
“You know…” I said, again, as offhandedly as possible. “When I come into a dead person’s house, there could be a stack of diamonds on the dining room table and I wouldn’t even glance at them, but … I tell ya… Show me a bowl of fruit or big ‘ol box of doughnuts…..” my voice trailed off, I stared at the doughnuts and shook my head, then glanced back at the officer.
Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and I was certain she was about to utter something to the effect of: “Ew!”
“Oh my GOD! I’m the same way!” she gasped.
And the next thing you knew both of us had completely forgotten about all of the investigating we were supposed to be doing, forgotten about the mason-jars full of weed on the coffee table, forgotten about the dead body in the next room. Instead were comparing stories of the hungriest we’ve ever been at a scene and what we had to talk ourselves OUT of eating:
“…I’m telling you, the entire bedroom was LITTERED with Ghiradelli chocolate-raspberry squares… I wanted to eat one SOOOOOOOOOO bad….”
“… the entire pantry was STUFFED with bags of Doritos…”
“… a plate of chocolate-chip cookies just SITTING THERE by the oven…”
“… more gourmet granola bars than any human really has the right to own…”
We were so delighted by our mutual vice that we were completely unprepared for when the funeral home arrived to collect the decedent’s remains. We had to scramble to get the rest of the scene processed and ultimately admitted to the body-transport guys that the reason we were running behind was because we were distracted by the doughnuts.
The funeral director’s gaze followed our gestures and his breath caught in his throat for a moment.
“Mmmmmmm… doughnuts…” he cooed.
We all knew that the doughnuts were going to be wasted. They guy’s family was out of state and as we had already spoken to them from the apartment, we knew that they would not be coming into town to take care of the dead guy’s affairs for at least a week. By the time they got there, the doughnuts would be stale… if not moldy. Those marvelous doughnuts would be thrown away without a second thought.
Still, none of us actually went for it. Eating a dead person’s food, though not expressly forbidden, is still wildly inappropriate. Probably the only reason there isn’t an actual, written rule against such behavior is because most people who write such rules couldn’t fathom anyone actually wanting to eat a dead man’s doughnuts. All the same, we all exited the apartment with many a backward glance in the direction of the dark kitchen. But ultimately, we left the doughnuts to their lonely fate.
On the upside I came away from that experience feeling a little less freakish about my “problem”. At least now I knew I shared this curse with one other person… a seemingly decent and well adjusted person… a person who I saw the very next day when I was called out to yet another scene in which the decedent had either suffered some kind of natural event or overdosed on narcotics. The deputy sheriff greeted me cordially at the door, and escorted me back to the decedent’s bedroom.
“You’re gonna love this…” she said, throwing the door open and ushering me into the bedroom where our decedent lay slumped over on her bed, surrounded by the evidence of a wicked heroin habit. However, neither of us were looking at the needles, the dirt spoons, the cigarette lighters or the elastic band wrapped around the dead lady’s arm. At that moment neither of us could take our eyes off the night-stand… where there lay a
bright
shiny
un-opened
2-pound bag
Of peanut-butter M&Ms.
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