Silent Siren, page 24
How refreshing it was to see the concrete results of my efforts in the eyes of someone who was given a second chance at life. I am reminded of why I do what I do.
Looking to the Future
My journey in EMS and, more recently, the mortuary arts, has not been smooth, predictable, or always pleasant. In fact, it has often been the opposite, leaving me wondering on many occasions if I’m where I’m really meant to be.
Somehow, though, I’ve achieved balance and satisfaction in my work life. My full-time job at Skagit County Medic One allows me to work in an environment that maximizes my talents and minimizes my shortcomings. My work at the funeral home continues to be the way I give back to, and am a part of, the community where I grew up.
My journey with Bainbridge Island Fire Department has come to an end after nineteen years of service. The department changed radically in that time. Drilling on Tuesday nights in cold, damp bunker gear no longer interested me. The pager became more of an irritation than anything else, and I frequently turned it off at night.
I had always considered myself a volunteer at heart, and I saw the Department becoming a sea of blue uniforms, replacing the old guys in plaid shirts and work boots. Change is necessary; change is inevitable, but still, it makes me sad. I left at a time when I could still remember the enthusiastic kid with the bright white shoes and too-large uniform, before I became too jaded by what the department has become.
A Calling
So often throughout the course of my career, I have felt as though I am fighting a futile battle against a rising tide of death, age, and infirmity. Frustration mounts as I continue to respond to calls for obese eighty-two-year-old ladies with bilateral knee replacements, chronic lung disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and the like, whose families call us because one body system or another is failing. We ply our trade, sell our snake oil, patch our patients up with medical grade duct tape, and send them to the hospital, where they are observed, poked, prodded, phlebotomized, and irradiated, to be sent back home, plastered together with chewing gum and baling wire, to exist for a while longer until another malady brings them back.
Am I accomplishing anything good for the world with my multitude of legitimated poisons and elixirs of questionable medicinal value?
A memory from my Shoreline Fire Department days surfaces every now and then to remind me of why I continue in this often frustrating, often thankless, difficult profession. Snow fell softly to the ground as I left a health screening required of all Shoreline employees in Kirkland and stopped at a nearby cash machine. I wore my dark duty jacket with the Shoreline Fire shoulder patches and badge over a sloppy sweatshirt and sweatpants. I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and I probably looked like a vagrant who’d been handed a warm jacket out of charity. As I completed my transaction and turned to walk back to my car, a man stepped in front of me and thrust out his right hand.
“I just want to thank you for everything you do,” he said as he shook my hand.
Since I’d never seen this man before, I could only assume his spontaneous gesture of gratitude was predicated on his reading the patches on my jacket that belied what I did for a living.
I smiled. “You’re welcome.”
A few words from a stranger transformed, if only for a while, my perspective. When I have my moments of ambivalence, questioning the dubious role I play in a battle against the inevitable—death and the anti-Darwinian nature of our work, I think of that grateful man, and how all of that didn’t matter to him. What mattered to him was that when the alarm sounded whether day or night, my cohorts and I showed up and took care of the problem, regardless of how routine or insignificant it may have seemed to us.
A soft January drizzle spots my gray suit jacket as I lock the front doors of the funeral home and make my way across the wet gravel driveway to the removal van, paperwork in hand. An old woman has been found dead on her couch at a downtown retirement home, only blocks away from the mortuary and I have been called to make the removal of her body. As I shut the driver’s side door and turn on the ignition, my hand reaches for the heater controls and I slide the knob all the way to “tropical.” I don’t like cold. The faint odor of death mixed with germicidal hand soap permeates the interior of our funeral van. Rush Limbaugh rants through static on the Plymouth’s tinny speakers and I turn the volume down to an inaudible level. I still haven’t figured out how to turn the radio off entirely without removing the entire face piece. Anyway, I prefer the Bee Gees to talk radio. Pulling onto Madison Avenue, I watch pedestrians stride purposefully through the cold, hair wind-blown, lattes clutched in pale northwestern hands, oblivious to my mission.
The service entrance is located near a rusty dumpster, from which wafts the faint odor of rotting food. Next to it is a single door that leads almost immediately to an elevator, allowing removals to be made discreetly. I’m always struck, though, at how often I must park my vehicle adjacent to a trash compactor, recycling bin, or dumpster. It’s as though death is an embarrassment, to be dealt with as is refuse, bundled up in plastic and wheeled out a back door. I back the van to within a few feet of the door, pop the back hatch, and walk inside with my stretcher.
The dead woman’s daughter sits across from the resident director in her office downstairs, eyes red and swollen, tear-stained tissues strewn across the table and clutched in her hands. As I offer my condolences, she shakes my hand, sniffles, and smiles as if to say I wish we didn’t have to meet under these circumstances.
“Can…I see her?” she asks. “Say goodbye?”
The resident director, a blonde and statuesque woman in her forties, leans forward, gently lays a hand on the daughter’s arm, and looks into her sad blue eyes. “You wouldn’t want to see her this way,” she says.
Before I make my way upstairs, I promise the woman that I will make her mother look presentable and that she can come by the funeral home in an hour to pay her last respects.
From the doorway of the apartment, the dead woman is visible, gray-haired head slumped against the sofa’s arm rest, alabaster body semi-reclined on an overstuffed cushion, clad only in a threadbare T-shirt that stops at just above her belly button. Her legs are mottled, bare feet purple against the off-white carpeting. The smell of old blood emanates from a stiflingly hot bathroom, where several pairs of soiled underwear lie scattered around a toilet, its seat smeared with a dark, tarry substance, the bowl maroon with blood. It’s clear the woman has died from gastro-intestinal bleeding.
I lower the gurney to the floor perpendicular with the sofa and the woman’s body. With the assistance of the resident director, I gently slide her stiff corpse onto the cot. Rigor mortis usually begins in the jaw and is evident two hours after death. The woman retains the same seated position she was in when I place her on the cot—advanced rigor mortis. She’s been dead around twelve hours. The crinkling of plastic is the only sound as the woman’s sallow face disappears inside the body bag. It’s as if in that instant when her contours are no longer defined by clothing but by the plastic that wraps her head to toe, she ceases to be a person and begins to be a cadaver. I click two maroon seat belts above her chest and thighs and drape a gray shroud over her body, readying her for transport.
I arrive at the mortuary, place the woman in the prep room and go about my work. I comb her sparse gray hair, elevate her head on a pillow, close her eyes with the assistance of plastic devices, then suture her slack jaw shut so she has a pleasant expression on her face. Her hands and fingernails are dirtied with blood, so I clean them and lay them on her chest, right over left. I pull a blanket up to her neck. She looks like she’s sleeping.
An hour later, the woman’s daughter arrives. She stands just inside the funeral home’s entrance and speaks to me from across the room, hands clasped in front of her, bundled in a heavy winter jacket.
“Is she here?” the woman asks, her voice quavering.
“Yes.”
“On a bed or…” She trails off.
“It’s like a bed, yes. She’s on a gurney.”
The woman moves tentatively forward. “Oh.” She nods. From behind the office doors, I wheel the body into the viewing area. The daughter clasps her hands to her mouth. Her eyes well up with tears. I move the gurney into position, between two dim floor lamps, and step away to a respectful distance. The daughter stands next to her mother’s body for several minutes, holds her cold hand and weeps. “Goodbye, Mom. I love you,” she whispers.
The woman turns to me and says, “Okay, I’m ready.” Then she adds, “Thank you. She looks good.” She manages a weak smile.
Such interactions represent, for me, the nexus between my two vocations, EMS and the funeral trade—the ability to be fully present for a person in crisis, the ability to make the worst moments in somebody’s life a little bit easier. True, as a paramedic, I’ll save some lives along the way, and I have, but saving lives has become much less the goal than it used to be. EMS is primarily social work. Death care is as well. Both require empathy. Both require a cast-iron gut as well as the willingness to face what people fear—illness, injury, and the inevitable that faces us all, death.
Nevertheless, I can’t let the sorrows of others, the tragedy I see, take over my life and make me jaded. I run. I kayak. I spend time with friends who understand what it means to be a responder and a crisis interventionist—police officers, firefighters, and paramedics. I spend time in the sun, at the beach, away from illness, away from nursing homes, away from death.
I’m on the southern tip of Mexico at a rustic beach resort. It’s my first time out of the country, and the sun is shining brightly. The bright blue waves crash against the pristine white sand. The smell of sunscreen wafts from the young, healthy, tanned, attractive bodies that populate the stretch of beach in front of the resort. I’m both literally and figuratively miles away from pallor, infirmity, and death.
I wade out into the water up to my thighs and feel the cold numbness swirl around me and take away all sensation. Seagulls cry as they fly over, their wings making a soft rushing sound. I close my eyes and feel the warm tropical sun on my face, feeling the water churn. I’m thirty-five years old and hopefully, have many years ahead of me. I can breathe without pain or distress and I thank God for the life I have been given.
As the sun goes down, I make my way back to my Cabana, the taste of Margaritas on my tongue, the sting of a new sunburn on my bare shoulders. Tired but happy, I fall asleep to the crashing of the waves outside my door.
Matthew Franklin Sias, Silent Siren
