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.