When Words Fail

 You know what I love?
 Physics.
 I love physics the same way a teenage girl loves a movie star... I don't know a damn thing about Physics personally, but man, I love his work.  He can pin me to the planet anytime. 
 I also love physics the way lots of people love God... in that I can blindly and unquestioningly believe in Physics without a whole lot of actual thought or knowledge.  When there's something I don't understand, I simply say it's Physics at work... and you know what they say about Physics... he works in mysterious ways. 
 Oh, don't get me wrong, I believe in God too, but the dewey-eyed wonder dried up on that romance long ago. God and I are so used to each other, we don't even bother close the bathroom door when we're peeing anymore.  Physics, on the other hand, has always existed in a marvelous state of intangibility and virginal grace.  I never got far enough in science or math to really STUDY physics, consequently, I never had to over analyze physics, I never had to explain my belief in physics, I never had anyone question my blind faith in physics or suggest that another science might be the better, correct one.  In the magical land of physics, everything makes sense, everything is balanced and empirically measurable.  Logic is sound, even and flat enough to roller skate on. Equations balance. Everyone's shoes fit, doors don't squeak and everything arrives exactly when it's expected... it has to, it's physics.  And because I never studied physics, I never saw it's ugly side.  The shallow reflecting pool of my mind never encountered a single wave as it flashed a flawless, beaming face back up at the edifice of higher knowledge and said,  "none, for me... thanks, I don't need to taste, I'm just happy to be here... where I can gaze into the face of physics and simply know that it makes sense..”
  Physics... like God, or... say Santa Claus... good, benevolent... and only punish people who really, really deserve it.
 It wasn't until this last year that I had to defend physics... and I realized how little I actually knew about it.  It's easy to say that you have a sense of physics, but it's another matter entirely to actually put the laws of gravity and motion into words.  Suddenly I was a first-time missionary being asked all the hard questions by a doubting nay-sayer.  and I realized, I was completely ill-equipped to defend my faith.  Answering the question:  "How does that work" with "It just does"  was unacceptable, I should have known this because when I began wearing out on blind faith, that was they very question I asked... and I received the same, hack-job, answer.  It wasn't sufficient and kind of pissed me off- much like my answers for this woman were insufficient and seemed to only piss her off.
 I've had people ask some really uncomfortable questions over the course of my fledgling career. I can't vouch for this myself, but Henry (who has been a Medical Examiner for 20 years longer than I) has assured me that people will never run out of wacky queries. People will always continue to stump  and perplex... and I should be prepared to NOT be prepared to answer their questions.  That said, this one was a bit "out there". I mean, this lady curve-balled me like I've never been curve-balled before.
 She had gotten bad news, admittedly.  We had dispatched the local police in her town to go to her house and let her know that her son was dead.  Those officers had just done the heinous deed and given the lady my phone number, telling her to call me with any questions.  
 When we notify someone of their family member's death, I kind of expect a certain amount of lunacy.  I know that as soon as a person comprehends that someone they cared about is dead, all higher reasoning ceases and anything they say can be attributed to random nerves firing somewhere deep in their brain-stem.  Like women in a bridal salon, or men at a titty bar... lights are on... nobody's home. They may LOOK  and SOUND like they're awake and talking, but they're really just having some kind of complex seizure that mimics consciousness. Of course, I can't base this theory on anything other than my own experience attempting to converse with all three of these demographics.  But it doesn't take a double-blind, controlled study to know when someone has checked out.
 This woman had called after finding out that her son had been hit by a car.  The guy had been walking down the center of a dark highway in the middle of the night and a fast-moving SUV had struck and killed him.  There had been a slight hill just before the place of impact and the speed limit was 55 miles per hour... which is to say there's no way the guy in the SUV could have known the victim was there until it was far too late to swerve or even brake.  Our decedent had died on impact and that's all there was to it.  Of course, we weren't sure what our decedent had been doing in the middle of a rural highway in the pitch-black darkness... but that was okay because his mom didn't ask. Instead, she started asking other questions for which I had no answer.
 “The police told me that my son was killed and they gave me your number” she said, as though I was somehow responsible for the entire affair.
 “That's right, ma'am.  I'm so sorry.  Is there anything I can do for you?  Do you have any questions?”
 One of these days I'll learn not to ask that.
 “Well,” she said with an offended and incredulous air, “They told me he was hit by a car.”
 “Yes ma'am, he was.”
 “Well...” she huffed, “that just doesn't make any sense.  I mean, how does that happen?”
 “Well...” I said, “He was walking down the middle of a highway.  I mean, he was in the roadway, in the path of the car.”
 “But I just don't see how that KILLS someone.”  She huffed petulantly, as though such a thought was downright insulting.
 I was pretty taken aback at her reaction. My brain choked violently on the idea that someone didn't understand how cars manage to kill people.  So I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.
  Maybe she's always lived in a really crowded city or something, I ridiculously justified in my mind. Maybe she's always been surrounded by25 mile-per-hour zones and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Maybe she's never seen a car go that fast.
  “The car was going really fast... um... it was a rural area and there weren't any streetlights.  He was just over a small hill and the driver wouldn't have been able to see him until he was right there...”
 “But I just don't understand how a car can kill someone!”
 She was clearly getting agitated and annoyed with me... apparently because I was acting like someone getting killed by a car going 55 miles-per-hour WAS actually conceivable. 
 “Well,” I said tentatively as I began inching toward that big-bad-ugly land-mine that was just begging me to step on it. People always think they want to know how someone died... they don't. As I've said before, I do my best to avoid gruesome details, not because I'm trying to hide anything from them, but because the airing of those details won't accomplish anything.... especially in traumatic deaths.  No one is going to sleep better knowing that their husband was practically cut in half by the handlebars of his motorcycle.  Children won't be at peace when they hear that as their father's body was removed from his home, he was so decomposed that his arms came out of their sockets when we tried to move him.
 Nobody needs to hear that shit.
 Unfortunately, every now and then, a deeply curious (and masochistic) friend or family member insists their way past all my defenses and warnings until I have to just flat out say it:
 “Sir, (Or Ma'am) your buddy/son/daughter/brother/mom/dad/etc. was seriously fucked up.”
 This woman was getting to that point.  Typically, I give one final warning, an explicit one, in which I tell them flat out that the information for which they are asking is downright disturbing and are they SURE they want to know.  Inevitably, they always answer with a resounding “YES” and I have no choice but to hand them the big, fat, horror movie on a platter... just like they asked.
 Of course, this woman was a smidge different because she wasn't asking for the information to satisfy some deeply ingrained need for closure, instead she seemed honestly baffled by the idea that a speeding car could kill someone.
 For a second, I crazily considered informing her of a little something called “The Rule Of Lug- Nuts”.  It's a simple little axiom that I learned about while I was a paramedic.  The basic concept is this:  When there is a collision between two vehicles, the vehicle with he most lug nuts wins.  Motorcycles beat bicycles.  Cars beat motorcycles. Trucks beat cars. Ambulances beat trucks.  Fire engines beat ambulances and so on and so on and upward until you finally get into vehicles crashing into an aircraft carrier.  (I have no idea how many lug-nuts the international space station has)  Of course the sad fact of the rule of lug nuts is that human beings don't come standard-equipped with any.
 But I don't think this lady would have found her son's lack of lug nuts enlightening. Nor did I think she wanted to hear that her sister's chest went “squish” when I pressed on it.  So instead, I told her:
 “Well ma'am, she had a broken neck and there was a lot of internal bleeding.”
 The woman sighed.
 “But what did she DIE OF?” she asked with an exaggerated air of waning patience.
 Like that's not ENOUGH? I thought. What the hell is this lady after?
 The only deeper level of explanation available was all about physics.  And at that point, I would have had to admit that, in truth, I was completely ill-equipped to explain to this woman how the mass and density of a body simply cannot stand up to the mass, density and momentum of a moving car... or was it inertia that I wanted to talk about.  Hell I didn't know.  It was physics... why wasn't that enough?  And I wasn't about to attempt educating this woman on the biology of why humans need blood in their veins and air in their lungs in order to live.  We just do. Besides, even if I had been able to give her the full academic run-down, I'm pretty sure she would have responded by asking me for God's number so she could call the Almighty and demand an answer for why gravity is a law and why humans are built the way we are.
  People want answers.
 We love answers... as much as we love air and food.  We will go after answers as though they somehow manage to herd the air into our lungs.
 We like reasons and patterns, we like rationales and balance and and we dearly love the law of cause and effect.  We want to know what happened, and why and how to make it happen again or not happen again depending on whether or not we liked it. 
 We want to know what to expect next. 
 We're kind of stupid that way.
 Other species don't long for resolution or meaning.  When a gazelle is taken down by a lion in the wilds, that gazelle doesn't feel cheated or wonder what he did to deserve this fate.  He probably doesn't shake his fist (hoof?) at the universe and insist on an answer for this travesty. The gazelle's family doesn't want an explanation as to why that gazelle was at that particular location at that particular time. They don't insist on hearing the details of their loved one's violent death, nor do they ask if I have his wallet or the keys to his car. 
 On this side... my side... of death, I often wish people were gazelles.  I'll say to myself when I'm dealing with an especially pushy family,Why can't they just accept that this is the way it is?  Why do they have to keep hassling me with the same damned questions? Why can't they just let it go?
  Other times, I wish I could be a gazelle too.
  Like anyone else, I want firm ground beneath my feet, both physically and metaphysically speaking.  I thrive on structure and repetition and the feeling that someone reliable is in charge. I crave meaning and get angry and confused without it.  I can't count the number of times that I've demanded an explanation and then completely lost my shit when there wasn't one. 
  In the months after my father died, I was overcome with outrage by what I perceived as a profound lack of order in the world.  Why were heroin addicted-child-molesters still alive when my dad wasn't?  Where was the reason... the justice in that?  Wasn't someone keeping track of these things?  Wasn't anyone minding the front office around here?
 Then, a year and a half later,  my doctor called me to tell me that I had lymphoma.
 My initial reaction sounded a lot like this:
 “...”
 I remember I was in my bank, about to deposit a couple of checks when I got that call.  My doctor asked if I was in a place where I could talk, and I glanced around the lobby of Wells Fargo and thought to myself, “This is a great place to talk!  It's not gonna get noisy in here at all unless there's a robbery!” The conversation with my doctor was brief. After dropping the “C” word on me, he basically told me:
 “This is real. This is beyond me. You need an oncologist.”
 I wandered, dazed, out of the bank with my un-deposited checks still gripped in my hand. I felt ghost-like, as though my physical body had dissolved underneath me and I was just a hovering could of consciousness.  I had to leave... I had to go home. Where was my car?
  That's right, I thought to myself.  I parked it in the “Whole Foods” parking lot. Then, crazily, I remembered I needed to buy something in order to get my parking validated.  Aside from cancer, the last thing I wanted was to pay for parking.  I stumbled in to the boutique-grocery-store and drifted around aimlessly.  I tried to buy a few scoops of dark-chocolate covered almonds, then dumped them all back in the bulk bin.  I tried to buy a scoop of chocolate-peanut-butter malted milk balls. But again, I violently shook my head and flung the candy back into the display case.  I was about to burst into astonished tears due to the completely tragic fact that I was strangely incapable of buying chocolate (an event which clearly indicated that the world had tumbled off it's axis) when a random woman asked me about whether or not the deli had started selling the day's fresh waffles.  She was grinning as though these waffles were the answer to life, the universe and everything and she simply couldn't wait to eat one. 
 I gazed, dumbly, into her weathered face and straggly hair and had to confess that I didn't know anything about any fresh waffles.  I turned away, leaving her in the deli, her face alive with anticipation, as I, uncaring, grabbed a bottle of mineral water, two pumpkin scented votive candles and wandered to an open register.  
 Some people say that when they have received some calamitous news, everything afterward went by in a fog and they don't remember a thing.  I had the opposite experience.  It was like I instantly transcended into a hyper-awareness.  I could hear everything, see everything. I remember everything... right down to the burgandy-striped knit cap that the waffle lady was wearing.  But above all, I remember the question, over an over in my head, shrill and relentless as a car alarm... my brain begging:
 “What. The. FUCK?”
 I asked a lot of questions of a lot of people in the following week, many of which were repetitive, ridiculous, sacrilegious, brutal.  But in all honesty, I was really just asking one question, over and over again.  That question was: “What the fuck?”
 That question doesn't have an answer.  Yet I think about all the times I have morally and professionally obligated to answer that question for people.  How many times have I spoken into their devastation with information and findings and measurements and facts, when all they were really asking was, “What the fuck?” 
 I've rolled my eyes at their bewilderment and gotten irritated with their confusion.  I've repeated myself and explained and OVER-explained, when I should have just shut the hell up, accepted that they were never going to hear me over the roar of their own, personal, armageddon.
 I can't remember how my conversation with that lady ended, the one who couldn't grasp the death of her son.  I only know I'm no longer on the phone with her and therefore, I must have said something.  Whatever it was, I wish I hadn't said it. I wish I could have another crack at that phone call.  If I did, I think I wouldn't say anything at all in the way of reasons or explanations.  I wouldn't attempt to dispel that big, fat, what-the-fuck that takes up residence in our minds when the reality of life and the equally baffling fact of death are just too much to digest.  (I like to think they work together, you know, life and death. They're in cahoots to keep us in a never-ending state of stupefaction.)
 The the two of us could just sit there in silence, she with her dead son and me with my cancer, until we were both ready to breathe deep and move on from the truth that sometimes... physics, medicine, 
science 
and words...
...they simply fail.