Category: Blog Post

My family had always been a
remarkably insulated and self-contained unit. Despite my parents’ divorces
(they divorced when I was eight years old, remarried two years later, and divorced again just after I graduated from high school) there really hadn’t been much in the way of drama or anything you could call
real tragedy in my life. Even when my parents would fight they would do so with
a sort of quiet resignation; we didn’t have a lot of shit storms around our
house. We weren’t people who made scenes, which was both a point of pride and a
sort of mantra with both of my parents.

Because my family was so small, and
I suppose because we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, my childhood was
relatively untouched by grief. We were this strangely insulated little group of
emotional spectators, distantly puzzled by suffering and calamity and the usual
public and private responses to it. Typical small, ugly things happened to us,
but we had been spared calamity, let alone anything approaching true tragedy.
People in my life didn’t die, or hadn’t died, and in this, I realize, I was
remarkably lucky.

There had been an older boy in my
neighborhood that had drowned when I was a kid, and a couple of high school
classmates were killed in a car accident, but I hadn’t been close to any of
these people and hadn’t attended their funerals. Their deaths had been shocking
in that general way that all sudden deaths are shocking, I suppose. They had
also been profoundly mysterious to me, largely because of the way they had been
announced, briefly tsk-tsked over, and then dismissed by one or the
other of my parents with a rattle of newspaper pages being turned. Yet death
didn’t hold any emotional mystery or meaning for me. It seemed to be
simply this strange or puzzling thing that happened to other people.

I suppose I would have to
characterize both my mother and my father as reserved. They were self-contained
people, buttoned down. My mother could get paranoid, and had a voluble,
eccentric streak, but she didn’t do hysterical. If I thought about it hard
enough I might consider my older sister the most thoroughly rational person I
know.

I remember when I was young and
something disruptive happened in my life or around my house my mother would say
to me, “How do you feel about that, David?” Yet it was always clear to me that
this was something almost uncomfortable for her, something she assumed was
expected of her as a parent. She was attempting to communicate with me, I know,
but I also know that what she really wanted from me was almost always what she
got, a shrug. There was nothing more reassuring around our house than a shrug.
A shrug might mean, “I don’t really care,” “It’s no big deal,” or “What can you
do about it?” And all of those things ultimately meant that we weren’t going to
have any big scenes or make a fuss.

I suppose you could infer something
about my emotional makeup as a child by the nickname that dogged me through
junior high school: The Zombie. And also from the fact that being called The
Zombie never really bothered me in the least.

One of my first jobs out of college
was as a legal assistant at a large Chicago law firm, and I remember the first
apartment where I ever lived alone was in this non-descript five-story
cinderblock building, one of those absolutely generic and utilitarian examples
of (I assume) 1960s architecture that you’ll see all over every big city. My
apartment was in the back of the building, and every one of my windows had a
view of the brightly lit parking lot of a huge funeral home.

Shortly after I moved into this
place I developed a severe and persistent case of insomnia, and I got tuned
into the disturbing nightly routines of the funeral home. From appearances the
place did a bang-up business. It seemed like several times every night hearses
–and the occasional ambulance—would pull into the parking lot after midnight
and disappear into the darkness of the underground garage. Night after night I
found myself sitting in my living room with the lights out, drinking beer and
watching this mysterious and very final transfer or transaction taking place. I
found the routine oddly compelling.

Often in the aftermath of the
arrival of the hearse or ambulance there would be other visitors to the funeral
home. Cars would show up and take a space in the huge expanse of the otherwise
empty parking lot. It was always curious to me that most of these people would
choose to park at some distance from the actual entrance. I’d watch as these
people made the long walk to the backdoor, where there was a lighted vestibule.

Sometimes people came alone to the
funeral home in the middle of the night. Other times they would come in pairs,
or in even larger groups. However they came, they would make their way,
clinging to each other (if they had anyone to cling to), up the incline of the
long sidewalk that led to that backdoor.

I have to admit that this spectacle
was gripping theater, and it reached the point where the basic routine became
pretty much predictable. Once I’d seen the people into the building I felt
strangely obligated to sit there in the darkness until they came back out.

Sometimes they’d be back out in
fifteen or twenty minutes, and other times they’d be in there for what seemed
like more than an hour. What they’d do when they came out, however, virtually
never varied. If there was more than one person and they had arrived in
different vehicles they would gather around their cars under the lights of the
parking lot, and they would stand there quietly, alternately embracing and
moving away from each other and pawing at the pavement with their shoes. In
warm weather, when I had my windows open, I could often hear them weeping,
sobbing, choking through great, wrenching, congested squalls of grief.

If they had come alone, or in a
pair, they would almost invariably sit there in their car in the parking lot
for a prolonged period of time –I once saw one man sit there all night in his
running car. I assumed they could not bring themselves to go home.

This nightly ritual made me feel
lousy, but I couldn’t seem to escape it. Every night I found myself making my
way out to the living room and settling into the one chair in the room,
directly facing the windows. I’d tell myself that I was just checking in, but
inevitably I’d end up sitting there for the whole grim spectacle.

It didn’t take long for that
experience to sort of infect my entire life and affect my job. I felt like I
had acquired a dark secret, and was carrying it around with me every day. I
never told anyone about it, and I didn’t have any close friends at work.

This business went on for many
months, through one entire summer and into the late fall. I suppose it was
inevitable, but one night about five or six months into what I had come to
think of as a sort of vigil I watched as a car pulled into the parking lot and
a woman I recognized from my office emerged alone and made that long walk to
the backdoor of the funeral home.

I saw this woman every day; she was
a secretary on my floor, and I suppose she was probably in her fifties. She
wasn’t in the funeral home for very long, but after she came back out she
followed the standard routine by lingering in her car in the parking lot for
more than an hour.

The woman didn’t show up at work
for a couple weeks, and I never heard anyone in the office discuss a reason for
her absence. I couldn’t even tell you whom the woman had lost, whether it was a
husband (my first assumption, I guess, although now that I think about it I
never even entertained the notion that she might have lost a child) or a
parent. For several days I carefully studied the obituaries in the local
newspaper (another disturbing habit I’d gotten into, trying, I suppose, to fill
in the missing pieces of the puzzle), but I never saw her name –or what I
understood to be her name—show up in any of the fine print.

Partly in an attempt to break
myself of this increasingly disturbing habit I volunteered to go to Phoenix for
three months to work on a case that involved a lot of document retrieval. I was
going to be set up in one of those large extended-stay hotels right downtown,
and as I’d never really gone anywhere, I was actually somewhat excited to be
embarking on something that amounted to an adventure for me at the time.

My first night in Phoenix I had
just gotten settled into my room and I was sitting in the little dining room
area eating a pizza and watching TV when I heard the thump of a helicopter
outside my windows, growing insistently louder until it was literally rattling
the silverware in the kitchen drawer. I watched, astonished, as the helicopter
dropped into view directly adjacent to my window; I could literally see into
the helicopter, could see the pilot in his headset.

The helicopter landed on a rooftop
pad that was at almost exactly the same level as my room, and perhaps a hundred
yards away, separated from the hotel by a ground level parking lot. The cargo
doors of the helicopter were opened and several people dressed in surgical
scrubs dashed across the rooftop in that unsteady lurching wobble that is
characteristic of people approaching a helicopter. These people unloaded a body
from the copter and placed it on a waiting gurney. The body was already hooked
up to various I.V. bags, and it was obvious that I was watching a victim of
some calamity or mishap being delivered to a hospital’s emergency room.

It should have been obvious, at any
rate, yet it took me several disoriented moments to process what I was seeing.
There was a sort of floodlit glare to the proceedings that gave it both an
astonishing clarity and an unreal quality.

After this patient had disappeared
into the hospital through what looked like the gabled entryway to a saloon, I
didn’t have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for the appearance of the
first ambulance, moving in silence up the empty service road with its lights
tossing a strobing red wash over the dark adjacent buildings and empty parking
lots. The ambulance disappeared beneath an overhang, and shortly after its
arrival –and the arrival of the helicopter—I witnessed the appearance of a
solitary car in the parking lot beneath my window, and saw a young man spring
from this car and run full speed toward the area of the hospital into which the
ambulance had vanished just moments earlier.

As attracted as I had gotten to my
grim vigil each night in my apartment across from the funeral home, this new
spectacle was certainly a noisier and more dramatic deal all around. I was
astonished by how many emergencies a big city can manufacture in the middle of
the night. This hospital, of course, was merely one of any number of hospitals
in the Phoenix area, yet virtually every night brought the appearance of at least
one helicopter, and it was not uncommon for them to come and go a half dozen
times in the course of a single night.

The ambulances came steadily, at
all hours, almost like taxi cabs. I supposed that the appearances of the
helicopter must have represented some truly life threatening crisis. Why else
resort to such extravagant transportation in the middle of the night? The
ambulances, however, could be carrying anything from heart attack victims to
hypochondriacs.

I’ll admit that I found it a bit
disconcerting that in attempting to escape my morbid routine back in Chicago I
would now find myself a helpless spectator to a variant spectacle. There was,
though, a crucial difference here; these people’s lives still hung in the
balance, and they might yet be spared the ride to the funeral home.

My own response to these nightly
dramas continued to disturb and puzzle me, mostly because I was fully conscious
that I was sort of blankly fascinated by what I was watching, and recognized my
almost complete lack of any kind of real emotional connection to events that I
was witnessing from the comfortable distance of my dark room.

Eventually I went back to Chicago,
got a different job and a new apartment, and gradually moved beyond the strange
vigils of that year. I’d sometimes think about those days, though. The memories
would come to me at odd times, and I would marvel at the things I’d seen and
try to make sense of that time in my life, and to figure out what it was I’d
felt sitting there night after night watching the private dramas of complete
strangers unfold.

I felt compelled, I knew that much.
I kept returning to the windows, after all, often for hours at a time.

But had I ever felt real
compassion? Had I ever felt frightened, for either those strangers or for myself
and whatever unhappy surprises the future might hold for me? Had I been moved?

I don’t think I ever did manage to find an honest
answer to those questions.