I don’t see something too often that completely throws off my daily thoughts of the world and my own life. I was driving home and I saw an ambulance and a police car on the side of the road. As I am driving by they are rolling out the stretcher. Here is how my thoughts processed as I look at the stretcher:
Oh, there’s a person on a stretcher….That person’s in a bag…OH!…THAT PERSON IS IN A BAG!
Oddly enough, after realizing what I had just seen, the very first thing that popped in my head was the news footage I had seen the day Heath Ledger died, but that was just TV. To actually see a bag with a body in it right in front of your face is the second closest I’ve been to a dead body.
The first closest:
There was this guy that lived down the street from us and his and my family were good friends. My brothers and I used to see him a lot and talk to him when we were kids. He was probably in his mid-20’s when he had a brain aneurysm and died from it. I was in middle school when it happened and it didn’t quite affect me right away. Then we went to his wake, and it was an open casket. That was a really weird and scary thing to see. I forget what a lot of things and people look like, but that image will be with me forever.
All I hope for is that for every person that dies, there is another person to miss them.
Tags: death
