Life is Pain

It was redundant question time.

I hate redundant question time...
... though I must admit, I've gotten better at it with some practice.  The trick is maintaining careful control of your tone and facial expression, especially when the decedent's family outnumbers you , 30 to 1.

When I had arrived at this, particular death, the only person present (other than the police officers) was the decedent's roommate/sister.  She was also the unfortunate soul who found the decedent  and she was, understandably, too distraught to really offer me any useful information.  I had left her in the hallway outside of her apartment to calm herself while I stepped into the residence to carry out my scene investigation and body examination.  A police officer was with her, so I figured she wouldn't be doing anything too unpredictable out there.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes folks who have just experienced a profound emotional trauma don't do anything but scream and cry...but sometimes, they scream and cry and set things on fire... or they scream and cry and start cutting chunks out of their wrists with pocket-knives.  While this young lady didn't have a knife, she DID have a cell phone... and the officer keeping an eye on her didn't think to stop her from using it.  Consequently, news of her brother's death had diffused through the entire building like a gas leak, and when I stepped out of their apartment and into the hallway to express my regrets to the sister and explain what happened next, I was confronted by said weeping sister, a coven of friends, a battalion of aunts and uncles and a legion of cousins...

... none of whom spoke English.

AND it was redundant question time.

Fortunately, someone knew a bi-ligual buddy who was quickly retrieved and assigned the task of translating my standard "I'm here to square things away" speech.  I speak a little Spanish, enough to know that she was doing an admirable job of being straightforward.  The problems arose when the assembly started in with their onslaught of questions as to what happened and when.

"Why is he dead?"

"How long has he been dead?"

"Are you SURE he's dead?"

These are some of the more standard ones, but these folks weren't stopping there.  They went ahead and asked me the question that I never really know how to answer... particularly when the answer is "yes."

"Was he in pain?"

I hate that question.

As far as it applied to this guy, I really have to say that I had absolutely no idea how much actual pain he was in before he died.  He had been living with his sister, trying to get his life together and shake himself free of a formidable drinking problem.  However, that day while she was at work, he succombed to one of the uglier conditions brought on by chonic alcoholism and suffered a volcanic gastro-intestinal bleed (from both ends).  He had managed to stumble around the entire apartment, depositing colossal puddles of bloody vomit and bloody diarrhea on his bed, the furniture, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, his sister's bed (and strangely enough, everywhere except for the bathroom) before finally collapsing and dying in the front foyer.  Walking into the apartment, The first thing I noticed (other than the dead guy)was the lavish floral decor and cute, anecdotal posters of fuzzy animals displayed all over the walls.  Conversely, all of these items had been smeared with blood, puke ans shit, giving the overall impression that the interior design had been a tag-team endeavor shared by Pollyanna and Freddy Kreuger.

I was astonished that anyone would actually ask me "the pain question" ... given the overall situation.  I'm pretty good at keeping my cool and only letting an exclamation slip out once or twice when I'm assessing a truly heinous death scene.  In this instance however, I uttered no less than 5 "Woah's", 2 "Holy Crap's", and 7 "GoodNESS's" (since I'm trying to cut back on the fucking profanity) Seriously, it was THAT bad.  The amount of blood along with the total area around which it was spread indicated to me that this guy had started bleeding suddenly and a LOT.  Following the trail, he had panicked and managed to complete 2 full circuits of the residence before he finally ran out of gas and crash-landed just inside the front door.  I've never had a GI-bleed myself and I gathered from my stint as a paramedic that the amount of pain involved in such a condition is highly subjective.  What I DO know for certain is that any physical pain tends to take a back seat to the utter and complete terror one experinences when they shoot 2 liters of their blood out of any orifice.

I assumed this guy's family probably didn't want to know all that.  So I hedged my bets and told them that if he WAS in any pain, that pain was probably dulled by the tequila that he had continued to drink throughout his ordeal. (Seriously, the bottle was still in his hand.)  But that answer wasn't enough for them.

"Do you think he knew that he was sick?" a woman at the back of the crowd called out to me.

To be fair, I understood her meaning.  People ignore the symptoms of a catastrophic illness all the time.  Case in point, I walked around for two days with abdominal pain that I stubbornly blamed on a green-chili burrito from "Chubby's".  It wasn't until I was being prepped for my appendectomy that I actually began to admit that I might be a little under the weather.   My dad jogged right through a heart attack and my husband spent this past Christmas loading and unloading appliances at work, taking an occassional break to go vomit up every meal he ate...  courtesy of Chron's disease.   Even so, my mind's eye flashed back to the tidal wave of blood spread across the coffee table, the swamp on the bed, the frantic smears on the walls...

"Yeah... I'm pretty sure he knew..."

All in all, I considered the evening a success.  I didn't technically LIE to anyone, but I managed to avoid actually exposing the assembly to the redundant and nauseating fact that their friend and brother had lost almost his entire blood volume out his ass, and he probably didn't have a good time doing it.

I hate that question:  "Was he/she in pain?"

But really, I have no problem answering this question when the answer is "no".  When someone gets  annihilated by car that hits them at 65 miles per hour, I am perfectly comfortable with looking that person's mom in the eye and saying:

"Ma'am, he never knew what hit him."

I'm still working on what to say when the answer is: "Yes, he absolutely WAS in pain".

When navigating these conversations, it takes me a while to find my way out.  Mostly because it can be very difficult to nail down how much the inquisitor REALLY wants to know.  I try to keep my answers non-committal until the person asking either realizes that they don't want the details, or they out-right tell me that they want EVERY detail.  I've had decedents' families accuse me of withholding information, but that's never the case.  I just want them to understand what they're asking for.  I want to spare them the harsh and sometimes cruel truths of a loved one's torment- and I want to spare myself the mental gymnastics involved in finding a diplomatic way of saying, "There's no doubt in my mind that it hurt like a mother-fucker."

As if answering the question isn't already hard enough, in suicides the answer isn't even a simple "yes or "no".  Things can be... ambiguous, existential... complex. For example,  I had one guy who decided to bid farewell to the mortal plane by jumping off the roof of his house... perhaps failing to recognize that the roof was not actually high enough to cause an immediate death.  It was, however, high enough to break his neck and paralyze him so he could become intimately acquainted with the new landscaping around his home and enjoy the delightful January rain for at least a day and a half before finally dying of exposure.  His wife (who had been out of town during this whole event) asked me if he had suffered and I was utterly stumped.  I mean, I can't imagine that laying facedown on a large pile of decorative rocks was comfortable... but who's to say that he was even conscious after the initial impact?  Besides, there was at least a decent chance that his spinal cord was so scrambled that he probably wasn't capable of processing ANY sensory input, painful or otherwise.

 On the other hand, he DID commit suicide, so asking me if he suffered seems kind of unnecessary.  I mean, he killed himself.  Therefore, I would conclude that in the moments before his death, his distress was unbearable.   And I would surmise that his irresistable urge to do himself in should be evidence enough of this fact...  so why ask me?

 It's a useless query.  When people ask me that question, they're essentially asking me to go back in time and enter the mind and body of their loved one, document and then report on everything they were feeling at the time of their death... something that I cannot do.  Furthermore, I can't help but wonder what difference the information is going to make now. 

No one wants to hear it, and I have to confess that I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that dying is painful.  And I come to this conclusion by way of the fact that living is painful;  "...anyone who says otherwise is selling something. " : So the quote from The Princess Bride goes.  As for me, I say anyone who says otherwise has never been cheated on, never gotten a tattoo and never had 7 cavities drilled in one day.   Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying life is a sucking swamp of  disappointment and ennui, at least not all the time.  I'm just saying life is frought with discomfort and unpleasantness... yet for some reason every biological process that we have stubbornly grinds away at continuing our existance.  In the face of inury, disease, tragedy... boredom, our bodies valiantly struggle to keep going- leading me to believe that death probably feels bad- or else why would we try so hard, on a fundamental level, to avoid it?

The fact is, redundant question time isn't actually about answering questions.  Even when I have the answers, end even when these answers are the ones people think they want to hear... they rarely help.  All of the comforting statements I make about how peaceful or painless a particular death was doesn't even begin to satiate the howling animal that these people are harboring way back in the deepest cave of their hearts.  I see it in their faces when they ask me.  They are crawling towards the core of their confusion and blindly groping for the question that, once answered, will make some sense of what they're feeling.

"Where did he get the gun?"

"Who was the last person who saw her?"

"When did he take the pills?"

"Was he in any pain?"

I give them the requested information and their faces pucker with dismay and dissatisfaction as they realize that the question that was just answered wasn't REALLY what they wanted to know.

What they're really asking is:

"What does it all mean?  How do I feel about my relationship with this person whom I will never see or speak to again? What the hell is this existance for?  What do I really believe about death?  What do I really know about life?"

It's easy for people to get lost on their way to these... the REAL questions. They get side-tracked.  They believe an autopsy, or a murder conviction, or an insurance pay-out will somehow aid in filling the void left by a death... and all of these things are valid and reasonable to hope for... but they're not answers.

So I guess, when people ask redundant questions, specifically, the pain question, what I would really like to say is this:

If the circumstances surrounding someone's death were painful- rest assured, the suffering is over now.  Whereas yours is just beginning. It's up to you to figure out what to do with it. I don't know if being dead is any better or worse than being alive.  I have no clue how drawn out someone's final moments are in their own bodies and minds, or if our concept of pain even exists in that context. But I know that the time a person spends dying is typically inconsequential when compared to the time that person spends living... and so maybe you shouldn't ask yourself if his death was painful, and ask inseatd if his life was painful.  Don't ask me to tell you irrelevant facts or comforting lies.  Look Death in the eye and struggle to understand what you see there.  What is death?  What is life?

What is the real question?