Category: death

I am here but to serve.

One fine afternoon, I found myself and two cops in a bedroom. The apartment building was quite familiar to both these officers and myself, a residence well known for Society’s less advantaged members, rendered so either by fate or life choices. We were standing over a dead guy sprawled on the bed in his skivvies. The “probable” cause of his death was sticking out of his left forearm. While I poked and prodded the body for anything other than the obvious, one of the cops gave me a brief history of the deceased. Ninety-one days ago, he’d been jailed for delivering a haymaker to his girlfriend at a nearby saloon. This was nothing new to their relationship, I was told. She’d called the police on him several times but always changed her mind and refused to press charges when the Law showed up. This last time, however, fell outside the usual pattern of their relationship. He’d succumbed to his passions and resorted to a familiar display of affection in front of several witnesses. That was a mistake. He walloped her hard enough to knock her cold. 9-1-1. She was loaded into an ambulance. He was stuffed into the back of a squad car, and long gone before she could collect her wits and save him from a trip to the hoosegow. Back on the street on what turned out to be the day before his last one on earth, he re-connected with his girl. He assured her that separation and confinement had not affected their relationship by –privately!– planting his fist in her eye socket. She was given the chance to seal the reconciliation by surrendering her bedroom to him and promising to “leave him the fuck alone” until told otherwise.

The Officer’s history was delivered over an accompaniment of shrieks and caterwauls. The wails were coming from someplace a short distance from the closed bedroom door, which his partner was leaning against. I was given the unnecessary explanation that it was the girlfriend. “She’s confined to the kitchen,” the door cop said, “Restricted.”

“It was the noise that got the neighbors to call the medics,” the other cop went on. “When they got here they had to peel her off him and sit on her—literally.” He pointed at the syringe. “Fuckin’ miracle that thing’s still stuck in ‘im.” More screeches. How I’d missed her coming in was a mystery. “Outside a couple breathers, she’s been at this shit since they left. We told her if she tried to get into this room again, we’d have to ‘cuff her and sit her somewhere else until you came and did what you had to do.”

I’m no stranger to hysterics, but the bawling and keening coming from down the hall were enough to put the most stoic heart into fibrillations. The cop looked at me. “If that racket is keeping you from doing what’s necessary, we could go ahead with that.” He gave a little shrug and a shake of the head, “Y’know, put her in the back of the squad until you’re ready.” His eyes were hopeful.

A generous offer, but I didn’t fall for it. Should this course of action be taken, it would have been made clear as to who was to blame if the grief-stricken young lady kicked out a window. The cops just wanted a few minutes of quiet, and I couldn’t blame them. This was one of those occasions when having spent eight years working on a psychiatric floor proved invaluable. I had a different approach in mind. I got the woman’s name, waved the door cop aside and stepped out of the bedroom.

The kitchen wasn’t hard to miss. It was about two feet away from the bedroom door. I saw her crouched below the sink. The instant I entered the hallway she was on her feet. In one bound, she was the arched doorway, yet not teetering one millimeter into the hall.

She had a contusion that fully covered a quarter of her face. It was ghastly. The shock it delivered when first beheld was amplified in its relation to her overall size. She wasn’t any bigger than your average fourth-grade girl. It engulfed an entire eye, reducing it to a scarcely discernible slit; purple to almost black and swollen flush with the bridge of her nose. It looked like she had a jellyfish stuck to her face.

My flashed expression of horrified sympathy was simple reflex, and it did nothing to affect the rage contorting the parts of her face not obliterated by a hematoma. There was no time wasted on introductions, either. She knew what I represented and what I was there to do. She wasn’t shy in expressing her feelings about it. I was a bloodsucker, a vulture, nothing more than a maggot. I was there to take away the only man she’d ever loved, loved more than anything in life, and he was the only man that had ever loved, cared for and protected her. I was there to drag him away and butcher him like an animal. I was going to tear up his perfect body, then throw it away like garbage. I didn’t care about him, her, or anybody else in the world either. I was sick and perverted, a faggot necrophiliac. I was a twisted piece of shit that got his jollies mangling innocent dead people, then laughing about it. I let her go on until she ran out of air.

As she sucked in another lungful, I half-shouted her name, pointed at the floor and told her to sit. This is a technique I learned from eight years spent earning a living on a locked mental health unit. I came to call it the “bark and purr” approach. It had the desired effect. Startled, she sat.

In turn, I sat down across from her. I looked her in the eye, took her hand, and started the spiel. In a quiet, even tone, I explained that I fully appreciated her shock and grief and understood how it made her behave. I understood her anger, disbelief and her pain, but also reminded her that her actions could neither change or help the situation. I explained it was understandable we appeared to be “enemies”, but our presence and actions were necessary. We had no choice. As awful as this was, it was our job… and she had a job, too. She needed to be strong for her lost love. She needed to be brave. She needed to be calm. If she could manage that, I could allow her five minutes to say good-bye, and give him a final hug and a kiss before I had to take him away. If she could be strong, brave and calm, she would get her five minutes. If she couldn’t… he was going, no matter what, and that good-bye would be lost to her forever. It worked. She was calm, the cops were happy, I wrapped my stuff up in peace and quiet. She got her five minutes. She remained in control throughout.

That was not a ploy. I did not trick her into behaving herself. I was sincere in all I said. I told her what I would have said to anybody under the circumstances. The method employed was one I’d come to learn the hard way, but in good fortune. Lifestyle and life choices notwithstanding, she still deserved this effort and consideration. It was my job and my responsibility to do so. That the policemen treated me as if I were Jesus for the rest of the time I spent there was a bonus. I was given license to feel smug. However, I would have been just as sincere in telling her this: “You don’t realize this, my young gal, but your life just got better. It got better the second the needle went in. It could just as well be you I’m hauling out of here.”

* * *

As much as I’d hoped to, I can’t wrap this up in the word count I’ve tried for two years to adhere to. So it goes. Try as I might… C’est la vie! The good thing is, the grand finale is half finished already, so you won’t have to wait long.

In the meantime, busy yourself with: this:

Hello, Kitty!

Again, I feel compelled to gratify elements of enquiry I’m usually loath to accommodate. Can’t say I’m sure as to why… perhaps it’s my age. Pushing into another decade on this earth—one that twenty years ago I’d honestly perceived my funeral would be in the works—and it could be I’m entering a phase of second childhood: I want to be noticed. I’m eager to please. Oh, well…

* * *

A former colleague who’s now moved on to bigger—though I doubt better—things related this to me years ago. She was summoned to a scene that involved an elderly recluse, an old lady. The fact that the woman was decomposed was no big deal. Ninety per cent of the time if we go out to pick up anyone over seventy years old, it’s either because they took a trip down a stairway or got in a car wreck, committed suicide (happens more with old folks than you’d like to think,) or some total shitbag—usually a family member– has killed them. These incidents still only make up about ten per cent of our “senior” clientele. Most medico-legal investigations concerning old people are performed in an atmosphere that’s best described as pungent. (If at any time while reading this you feel an urge to call Nana or Pop-pop, don’t hem and haw. Fucking do it.)

She told me when she got the call, the cop sounded weird. Nobody hates a decomp more than law enforcement. More than one of America’s Finest has told me the only thing they like less is the possibility of getting shot at. Near every cop I know said they would rather respond to a domestic scrap than stand over someone who’d have to be scraped off a floor. But this was different, she told me. She said the Officer was audibly shaken but would not elaborate. She pressed him, but he wouldn’t budge, just politely insisted she get there as soon as she could.

When she arrived, she was surprised to see a firetruck parked with the squad cars. The FD never hangs around for a corpse. Not in the city we operate in, anyhow. Their presence was explained when she approached a ‘30’s era, three story apartment building. Smoke evacuation fans had been placed in the doorways at the front and back of the building. (This might seem a good idea, but is not. I’ve also been in a building where this was done. It doesn’t work for shit. You can’t “waft away” that kind of stink. For one thing, it binds to everything. Another thing is, by the time anybody smells it in your average apartment building, the source of the stink has saturated and soaked into whatever the corpse is lying or sitting on. It’s not going away. The only rival for that kind of stench is cat piss. All running those fans does is flood the whole building with an odor most folks find disagreeable.)

The cops—well, one of them—led her upstairs to the second floor. To her surprise, one of the firemen went up with them. Curiouser and curiouser… Which apartment contained the dead woman was obvious. There was a third fan in the doorway. The cop stopped in the hallway, well short of the roaring machine. He told her the reason of her visit was in bedroom, wedged between the bed and the outer wall. He explained the person who’d been contacted regarding a foul odor was covering for the real manager, who was on vacation. She only made it as far as unlocking and opening the main door of the apartment. The stink really hit her then, and she bolted. The officers didn’t try to stop her. They went to the bedroom door and found it was locked as well. He motioned to the fireman. “We called them,” the policeman told her, “because they’re better at getting in a locked place than we are.” He spoke to her over the roar of the fan, which the firemen had decided to set up of their own accord. The “foul odor” was now present throughout the building, insuring that anyone who’d not experienced the initial cause of all this ruckus wouldn’t feel they’d missed out.

The cop continued: The Fire Department arrived and forced the bedroom door, probably causing no less damage to it had the police just gone ahead and kicked it in. The fireman, wearing his respirator, had been nodding at every word. The cop paused a moment. This was the set-up. He was about to get to the weird part.

“When the door popped open, we all got the shit scared out of us.” She said the cop’s face became a mask. She said he swallowed, shook his head, then said, “Cats.”

She told me he didn’t say any more, just stared at her as if it was all that was needed in matter of explanation. She said the man just maintained his blank look. The fireman stepped up.

Lifting his respirator, he clarified. “There were three of ‘em.”

She must have made it clear that a little elaboration was needed, because the fireman went on to tell her that once the door was open they had the bejeesus startled out of them when “a blur” flew at them, out the door, through the living room and into the hallway. “Took us a second to even realize what it was.” The fireman was shaking his head now, instead of nodding. “Couldn’t even be sure of how many there were, at that moment. One of my guys was putting the fan in the front entry. He told us how many they were. Startled the hell out of him, too. He said they went right over the fan, down the sidewalk and were gone.”

Here’s the upshot: The decedent was an older woman who’d lived in the building for over twenty years, yet there wasn’t a single person in that building who could tell you diddly-squat about her. Nobody knew of any medical issues, whether she had any living family, what her favorite color was. She was, for all practical purposes, non-existent, invisible. This is an old story, sad and pathetic as it may be. The story, as related to me, was that there was nothing in the apartment outside of her bedroom that indicated there was anybody or anything in her life that had anything to do with what went on in the world past her front door. There were no letters, cards, photos that hinted she had a relationship of any kind with anyone. Sad, yes? Once her mailbox was accessed, several days after her body was removed and our Office was laboring to find someone willing to bury her, there was nothing but bills and junk mail. (The earliest postal date was five days before she rotted to the point she could no longer be ignored.) This was provided by the building manager, refreshed from a lovely vay-cay and not shy about sharing his relief over not having to deal with her demise. It was related to me that he was, however, no less pissy about having to contend with the remaining mess. It seemed all she had for companionship, interaction and nurturing were her three cats. The cats with whom she slept  . . . behind a locked bedroom door.

What the cop and the firemen chose not to elaborate on—and left my colleague to discover on her own– beyond the trio of felines desperate dash for the streets, was that those kitties had spent at least five days with no access to their kibble. The cats—obviously—did not share their lonely owner’s fate. They did not pass into the Great Beyond, and were arguably just as fit and full of mischief as they were before retiring to sleep on that fateful night. They did what any creature would do when self-preservation was the issue: They made do with what limited means fate had left them.

My colleague related that when she entered the bedroom the deceased woman was right where the policeman and the fireman said she’d be. They had chosen to remain in the hallway. No effort was made to move her into a more accessible location. One reason was that she was decomposing. Neither cop nor fireman will touch a decomp without prompting, though I’ve yet to meet one that has refused such a prompt. That’s our job, to be sure. What may have exacerbated any normal hesitation they had at moving a putrefying corpse was clear at her first glance. It was what the trapped kitties had done to spare themselves a fate similar to their owner’s.

The old woman was in a kneeling position, head wedged in the corner, hips up. By the looks of things, my colleague related, the cats didn’t suffer their hunger pangs for long. The old lady’s hamstrings were gone. So was the lower third of her buttocks. Picked to the bones. Her femurs, hip joints and a fair portion of her pelvis were exposed to open air. Fleshless. Picked clean. The missing flesh had left the apartment in a blur, into the hallway, out the front door, down the sidewalk and gone.

Is there a lesson in this? Dunno.

You tell me.

* * *

Want more stuff?

 

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You’re welcome!

To all who read this, I am about to give you a gift. If my presence on the ‘net is not enough, if the words I offer aren’t sufficient to fully enhance the lives or warm the hearts of all who sup at the generous table I lay out whenever I feel like, I’m about to take another unselfish step. Here goes: If you are planning to die suddenly and unexpectedly and you’ve got some stuff stashed you’re not particularly proud of, like in your underwear drawer, your car, at work in your desk, locker or any other such space, get rid of it—and right-fucking-now. Jesus can show up at any time to bring you Home. You don’t want anything laying around that may give Him second thoughts about setting you up in His neighborhood. I’ll now offer an example.

I was called to a residential death in an upscale apartment building. The decedent was a guy, fifty-three years old, and was found by a friend. He was laying dead in the hallway between his bathroom and bedroom. The guy was naked, save a bath towel. He was obviously very fit. Not an ounce of flab on him. The friend who found him explained he was there to pick him up for lunch, and when the door wasn’t answered at his knock, he assumed our decedent was in the shower and walked right in. This was not unusual, routine even. The friend further explained that the man was in even better shape than he appeared. He had run over a dozen marathons in as many years. He had, in fact, been training for his next one on that very day. When they’d made arrangements for lunch, the friend told us the man had said, “I’ve got to get eight miles in today. How ‘bout we schedule it for (whatever time, I can’t remember.) I can get my miles in and take a shower in plenty of time.” He also reported the man had never smoked, drank maybe three light beers over the course of a weekend, and had the type of diet you’d expect from a hard-core runner.

Which brings me to my standing in the hallway, scratching my head along with the patrol cops. While this appeared to be a natural– if wildly unexpected– death, I haven’t the convenience of leaving it at that. I cannot just pack him up and let the docs sort it out though, essentially, this is what appeared as to how it’d all shake out. Nope. I’m both compelled and obliged to do a bit more snooping. I’ve more than once been to the quaint residence of a septuagenarian grandparent and walked out with not just a corpse, but bindles of crack and a scorched glass tube, or a half-empty bottle of freshly prescribed vicodins. Things are not always what they appear to be.

So, I poke around. No painkillers in the medicine cabinet or a kitchen cupboard. No bottles of booze tucked beside the couch or secreted in a desk drawer. I was making a last casual recon in the bedroom, probably the most popular area to hide stuff from prying eyes, when I had a “what have we here?” moment.

It would have been obvious to a blind man that the box on the closet floor, half hidden by a pile of running shoes, didn’t contain a few pounds of heroin or any other means of self-destruction. But, I am a nosey-body by mandate and had a closer look. It was a human pelvis. This was not the trophy of a twisted serial killer. It was a facsimile of the hips-and-buttocks region, anatomically correct in every way imaginable, casted in life-like silicone in the exact proportions of one of the “hottest stars in adult film.” That’s what it said on the box. This claim was supported by a photo of the young lady, and it could arguably have served well against accusations of false advertising.

As I pondered the relevance of such a discovery, one of the patrol cops walked into the bedroom and informed me the friend had contacted the dead guy’s daughter. She was on the way to the apartment. He added she was insisting on seeing her father before I hauled him away—if such a thing were possible. When I told him it was, I noticed he was also apprising the XXX package, which I was holding in my hands. He looked at me, smirked and said, “I suppose you need to take that with you.”

My answer was something to the effect that I would, but only to save him the embarrassment of missing a 9-1-1 call because he was taking a crack at it in his squad.

In truth, I was considering it. With his daughter on the way, I was uncomfortable with the possibility that she might see what Dad had stashed in his closet. These situations are anything but scripted. There was no way I could be sure there might have been something else—presumably less scandalizing—in the closet, an object of deep sentimental value she had to have immediately. I couldn’t let her rush into the bedroom in a state of overwhelming grief only come face-to-ass with a meticulously crafted representation of some porn-slut’s moneymaker.

I told the cop—after casually tossing the rubber butt back into the closet—that she could see her dad if she showed up in a reasonable time. He said she was about twenty minutes out. I said I wanted the dead man to be in a more presentable state when she came into the apartment. If she showed up before I could do that, I asked him to stall her outside until I gave him an all clear. His professional face was back on. He assured me he and his partner would handle it, and he added they’d already made a call to the police Chaplain. He promised they wouldn’t let her in until the minister showed up.

The driver and I put the dead marathoner on the cot, tucked him in, shrouded him, and wheeled him into the living room. I immediately raced back into the bedroom in a mad search of what other implements of self-gratification our dead guy might have cached. All I could find were a few skin mags and a jar of balm. I stacked all of it on the bed along with the prosthetic pelvis, and wondered what might go wrong in the course of making a frantic dash with this crap out to the hearse. I had just decided to swipe a pillow case to conceal it before leaving the room, when I heard a fresh voice. I looked out to see another man, one dressed in construction garb, talking to the other patrol cop. The officer turned away from him and saw me standing down the hall. “It’s the son-in-law,” he announced.

I am not a religious man in any traditional sense. However, I have been in enough situations where I could not ignore what I have now come to deeply believe are moments of Divine Intervention. I interrupted whatever exchange the cop and our newcomer were having with a spastic gesture directed at the son-in-law, one that could only be interpreted as “Get your ass over here now!”

He complied. Before I let him into the bedroom, I made him confirm he was married to this man’s daughter, and that she was en route.

He nodded. “She called me before she left work. My job site’s only about a mile away.”

“I’ve got a few things in here I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need to see,” I told him. When he entered the bedroom and got an eyeful of what I’d laid out on the bed he turned to me, gaping but leaving no doubt he and I were in complete agreement. I offered him the pillow case and left him to do what he felt was best. In less than a minute, he squeezed his way past the policeman and I, scrambling out to the dumpster in the parking lot. The daughter arrived just a few minutes later, just ahead of the Chaplain.

The driver and I departed with the deceased (that afternoon his cause of death was determined to be the result of a massive myocardial infarction). We left his devastated daughter to find what comfort she could in the arms of her husband and with the kind counsel of the Chaplain. I left with the solid belief that things had gone better than I could have ever have planned.

More to cum…

* * *

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All my friends are junkies… (that’s not really true…)

Thank God for the Government. The solution for the scourge of opioid addiction in my particular state-of-residence should allow us all to sleep easier. There is a proposal up for consideration that will levy a one-cent-per-milligram tax on opioids produced by Big Pharma and prescribed within the state. That’s hittin’ ‘em where it hurts. That’s boxcar loads of cash. This money is ostensibly earmarked as funding for law enforcement, education, intervention and treatment. My bet is Big Pharma will at first throw a tantrum, bring it to the cusp of a court battle, then humbly capitulate. They may even offer a show of contrition… and six months later start jacking the price of every other pill in the state to the tune of about a penny an mg. This’ll surely cover the tax, and easily recoup the cost of all that discount naxalone/Narcan they will selflessly offer to cops and medics to administer to OD victims.

The promise on tighter monitoring of prescriptions has gotten louder and louder as well, so now the friendly family doc is on alert and had better tighten up. Threats of suspended privileges and censure are no longer idle.

Glad we’re finally getting a handle on this thing. Not.

***

Human history has had its share of cataclysmic disaster. To believe this crisis is an anomaly or aberration is blissful ignorance and modern-day arrogance. I’m not specifying drug abuse/addiction in particular. Since the dawn of recorded history there have been epochs and eras where sudden spikes in wholesale death came to pass. And I’m taking warfare out of this equation. Pandemics and drought, plague and pestilence! Sure, there were a few folks who picked up the flails or rough timbered crosses and slogged around the countryside, making appeals to God’s mercy and demonstrating penitence, but most people reacted to widespread catastrophe by hunkering down and waiting for things to blow over. “Cryin’ won’t help ya, prayin’ won’t do ya no good…” Losing a few family members was a grim expectation in the best of times. When it didn’t rain for five years or a plague swept over civilization, the best one could do was hope—or pray—that whatever cosmic deity they believed to be in charge was more pissed off at the neighbors.

Ah, times were simpler then. The local liege-lord didn’t step out onto the balcony and assure the serfs and peons of his understanding of how serious this situation was. He didn’t inform them he and his staff were hard at work in finding solutions. He didn’t offer pep talks centered on courage and unity. He sure as hell didn’t make promises about “programs” or “special committees” being put into place to alleviate the suffering or finding a means to combat it. In those dark days before mass media, the town crier didn’t march up and down the square barking statistics and bemoaning the fate of “the children.” Nobody expected as much, either. Everybody knew they were in the same boat and equally fucked, whether they lived in a castle or a mud-walled hovel.

Ah, how times have changed. We no longer lack for information. Panic can now be spread and fed in nanoseconds. The upside of this we have instant access to statistics and whatever agenda they’re put forth to prove, and we now enjoy regular updates on the welfare of “the children.” We’ve progressed beyond primitive belief and simple mindedness We’ve outgrown and “out-sophisticated” a thing so silly as accepting the Will of God, and supplanted it with the more enlightened and humanistic approach of assigning blame. Who needs a cleric when we’ve got lawyers and politicians? No better place to seek counsel when it comes to determining where fault should lie. We’re so advanced that we don’t even blame Mother Nature when it doesn’t rain or the tsunami hits. It’s no longer a natural occurrence, but the result of greedy and selfish fuckers who are destroying the Earth Our Mother from both within and without.

Now is when you should ask: “What the hell does this have to do with opioid addiction?”

And now is when I answer: “Everything.”

Despite our modern knowledge and sophistication, we are just as stupid and oblivious as we were in the Middle Ages. We have convinced ourselves that this knowledge and sophistication imbues us with control. We are convinced we have power over conditions that were once universally accepted as forces humankind was powerless against. We can well delude ourselves that we’ve come to the point where Mother Nature is a force we can play with—for good or ill—but won’t accept there is another nature we can’t do shit about: Human Nature.

People like to get fucked up.

Now that we’ve all outgrown the notion that God runs the Show, we’ve chosen to elect (for those who enjoy democracy) people who’ve determined themselves capable in doing His work. Those not living in a democracy are stuck with people who’ve decided to play God. Either way, the people affected by pandemic addiction and death ultimately aren’t going to fare any better. In many ways, we’ve worked very hard and very long to go nowhere.

Since my middle school days, I’ve been told by the powers that be that education was our greatest weapon in the battle against addiction. That’s been the line adopted by those in our nation we’ve put in charge of determining what’s good for us. Folks, we’re educated. If there’s one person in this country that hasn’t had the dangers of opiates and opioids pounded into their heads since elementary school, then that person lives in a cave or a culvert—well “off the grid” in any case. We have all been schooled on the dangers of tobacco, drugs and alcohol . . . and sugar, caffeine, genetically modified chickens and anything “supersized.” Put ten schoolkids in front of a steel post in sub-freezing weather. Tell them not to put their tongue on it. Tell them why it’s a bad thing to do. Stress and re-stress what consequences they could face in performing such an act. Provide evidence, show them pictures, recite testimonials, get an expert opinion. Repeat it over and over until you get every kid in the group to assert licking a frozen pole is a dreadful thing to do. Repeat, repeat, repeat… I’ve not a doubt whatsoever that, despite all this good intent and information, at least one of those little shits will find himself glued to a stop sign within the week.

More by Friday, the end of all this, in fact, guaranteeeeeeed. I’m getting back on track, but it’s taking longer than I’d thought it would. Why is this so? Here’s why: https://www.amazon.com/Lunacy-Death-perspective-developed-investigation-ebook/dp/B079DWFH9T/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519665668&sr=8-1&keywords=lunacy+and+death+book

I’m a fleabit peanut monkey…

“One Nation, Overdosed”. That’s NBC’s catchphrase for this mess. Clever, isn’t it? The nation sits in the easy chair and shakes the collective head—those of us that aren’t piled on the street corner waiting for the body-wagon. “Bring out your dead!”

After OxyContin was relegated for use on patients that were essentially “goners”, the huge numbers it created dwindled almost overnight. I’ve haven’t seen an OxyContin OD in well over ten years, probably longer. “Hillbilly Heroin” became an archaic term in my part of the world. But, as said in the previous post, the roster of Opioid deaths did not diminish. From that point on, overdose casualties were easily the most predictable COD (cause of death) in our Office for anybody under forty-five years old. It became such that when the cops called in a death and you were given a date of birth that was in the 1960s or more recent, you automatically thought, “Hells bells, another one.” It became trite. Passé. Boring. Annoying. “Can’t these people find another way to kack?” A traffic death became manna from Heaven. You delighted in a good ol’ gunshot and wanted to shake a man’s hand for hanging himself. If your partner was going out to pick up an old lady who’d taken an unfortunate tumble into the basement, you were jealous, because you knew fucking well the next phone call would be a thirty-year old, unemployed brick layer with a pillar of foam rising out of his mouth.

After a while, it wasn’t just the standard opiates and their derivatives, but any substance that’s origins could be traced to a poppy field. Methadone, for crying out loud, the stuff that’s supposed to get you off the “hard stuff,” had become a popular conveyance to the graveyard. Then another, rather well-known substance was added to the list. “Smack,” “skag,” “H,” “horse,” “tar,” “brown sugar.” Heroin, man… The Grandaddy. Big Pharma had an old-but-new competitor, and with it a distributorship that didn’t have the FDA fucking with the product. Can’t blame the hippies this time around.

My first honest-to-god heroin OD was something of a hippie, a man in in his early thirties, living in a loft-style apartment, walls covered with his own artwork and a few guitars lying about. This was back in the OxyContin days, and was perceived as something of an anomaly. He was found on the floor next to his couch, insulin syringe still sticking out of his left forearm, a spoon and a candle on the coffee table. He hadn’t even gotten the tourniquet (a bandana) off his bicep. Old School, ya dig? But, there was something decidedly un-Old School sitting on his kitchen table. It was a FedEx envelope, addressed from a town near San Diego. The PD investigator told me that was “a new one on him.” He added “this stuff has been showing up, but it’s pretty rare.” When I brought the decedent back to the Office, it caused a bit of a stir. It had been the first one we’d seen in years, long before I’d shown up. Since then, the cases were heroin was the culprit have increased exponentially. One of the last ones I’d picked up, less than a year ago, was no hippie. He was barely into his twenties, discharged the day before from his third inpatient rehab stint, and hadn’t spent a minute away from his parents since they’d picked him up. The only time he was out of sight was in his bedroom. His kissed his mom g’night the evening he was home again, and was found dead in his basement bathroom the next morning. He’d never left the house, because his father had sat up all night fearing he’d sneak out and score, like he had the last time. There was a bindle of gritty brown powder in the key pocket of his jeans. Where’d he get it? That question triggered a little brainwork. He’d been strip searched when he was admitted to the facility, and spent the first week in a scrub suit. His clothing had been searched, then washed in an industrial/ commercial machine—one that would destroy any contraband no matter how well hidden or packaged. It was searched again once he’d earned them back. The only place he could have copped had to have been the facility itself, and just before he was discharged. I’ve heard that this has been an incident that’s not uncommon. Cartels and other bigtime organizations have been seeding treatment facilities for years. I’ve gotten word that treatment centers have clamped down on how much cash a client was allowed to have. Foolproof? A stopgap at the very least? Great on paper, bad in practice. I know a guy that sells weed who takes credit and debit cards.

“Why heroin?”, you may ask. Great question. Unlike those in the market for stimulants, thousands of opioid addicts didn’t acquire a dependence by seeking out a thrill. They got it by ending up in an emergency room or a doctor’s office. It’s a story everybody knows by now. Jim shatters his wrist after slipping on the ice. Jeanie’s back is knocked all to shit when she gets rear-ended coming home from the grocery store. Both go home with a bag from the pharmacy. Two months later, they’re back in the office or the ER, trying to convince a doctor that physical pain is still unbearable and they need that Percocet or Vicodin just to lead a normal life. This game works for a while, but eventually Jim’s doctor says “No more,” and Jeanie has found herself on the “professional patient list” at the local emergency room. The Doc giveth, and the Doc taketh away. Now they have something in common with the crackheads and tweakers. They have to find an alternate supplier.

They can get the same stuff, quality controlled, legitimate lab produced pills on the street, but their insurance company’s not about to help in footing the bill. A few years back, I was informed a single, 5 milligram tablet of Oxycodone sold on the street for anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars. That much for a dose that has long been inadequate for your average abuser. An addict is taking three to five times that much—and not just once a day. Crushing and snorting, dissolving and injecting (needles and syringes require a prescription as well), and smoking it were an unpleasant and risky means of keeping the cost down. It doesn’t do much for enhancing a person’s self-image, either. Enter heroin.

Supply and demand, folks. Smack is back, and supplied by people with no regard for the consumer’s safety, or a concern for consistency in the quality or potency for the product. All it had to be was cheap. Here’s the breakdown. Jim now needs five Oxy’s to sufficiently “feed the monkey.” That’s gonna cost anywhere from fifty to one hundred twenty-five dollars every time that monkey gets hungry. A milligram of heroin—a reasonable, if not better, substitute for five mgs of oxy or hydrocodone—sets him back only five to ten bucks. That makes for one stuffed monkey. And you didn’t need to have it flown in from San Diego, either.

***

More, oh, much more, in a couple days. Big Pharma hasn’t been asleep at the wheel. And I’ve yet to give you my take on how I see the gov’t is handling this from my particular seat at this show.

 

Lunacy and Death Ebook now available on Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble and I-books. Have a look, buy the book. Currently at a discount price. Amazon link:Link to sale page.

Somebody better clean up this junk!

Facebook flagged me as a degenerate pornographer for my display in the previous post: a nekkid woman in an opium den, circa 1928. Shame on me. I’ve learned my lesson. Say hello to ‘Sailor Moon!’  As wholesome as it gets.

Repeating myself: OxyContin is Oxycodone. The difference in nomenclature steams from it being nothing but Oxycodone, just in a different “presentation’” if you will. The name is just a portmanteau of “Oxycodone” and “continuous.” No acetaminophen or aspirin mixed in. OxyContin, in the prescribed amount, also contains more Oxycodone that the dose found in Percodan or Percoset. Why? Because it’s buffered, it’s time-release, and in the process of making it so, the oh-so-attractive secondary effect had been negated. It’ll cure what ails ya, but only physically—when taken as prescribed. The promise of euphoria has been removed, and thus its temptations.

That’s the key, folks. Take these pills as directed and once the pain has been resolved, you won’t want to take any more of them. Do as your told, and you won’t get into trouble. Life wouldn’t be so difficult for us human beings had we heeded that statement the first time we heard it, and adhered to it for the rest of our time on this planet. If that line of thinking was all that was needed, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. This is right where doctors, Big Pharma, the press, and yes, the Government (note the big “G”) prove themselves as helpless and befuddled as those they care for, serve and ostensibly protect. This where they fail, and fail miserably.

Firstly, directing a junky to obey a prescription order is a conversation just as effectively held with the cat. Addicts aren’t heedful. If that approach had the slightest shred of merit, there wouldn’t be a problem. Secondly, telling an addict—or anyone else, for that matter—that what you most greatly desire in life has been put in a package that you can no longer open is a challenge, not a deterrent. How did the afflicted meet this challenge? It didn’t take long. Turns out that if you wanted open the package oxycodone now came in, all you had to do was crush it up and snort it. Or crush it up and inject it. Or crush it up and smoke it.

Curses, foiled again.

When OxyContin was released for public consumption and could be scribbled on a prescription pad, we at the office saw the effect almost immediately. We collected a shitload of dead people who were in possession of little blue-green pills. It blew past the “traditionals” on the first turn and entered the backstretch, going away. One could wonder why this spike in drug specific ODs would make such a leap. It was essentially the same drug that was snuffing people at a lower rate just weeks before, so why should this stuff—believed to be overdose-proof to the overly optimistic—pile up to what became at that time record numbers. Part of it was that it was suddenly the “new toy”. “You ain’t hip ‘til you take this trip.” Sad but true. What was ignored was that, while the same chemical, the dose was being served up three times stronger. Your previous therapeutic dose was intended to be effective for about four hours. OxyContin was meant to do three times the job, i.e. twelve hours. Therapeutic levels don’t fit the parameters of abuse. Opioid addicts I’d encountered typically abused their Percosets, Percodans and Vicodins orally. Crushing, then snorting or injecting it was the exception rather than the rule. Oxycodone is an “immediate effect” opioid. You gulp ‘em down and the narcotic effect initiates in minutes. Taking it this way was factored into the overall intended effect the medication. A reasonable example of abuse would be taking three pills when one was recommended. Snorting or shooting it up bypassed the digestive system, a natural buffer, and provided a straight shot into the bloodstream and hence the brain. People I’ve known with opioid addiction told me they didn’t like to snort or mainline because the initial rush was too intense. This massive hit usually resulted in a sudden and overwhelming physical reaction. They either vomited – “an instant punch-in-the-gut, projectile puke”– or passed out. “You’re out before you can even exhale,” I was told. “And when you come to, you can’t even fuckin’ move, like you’re nailed to the floor. Your whole day is pretty much done.” While you didn’t need as much if snorting or injecting, it was still seen as a “last resort”. “You only go that route if you’re running out and you don’t know when you’ll get a chance to resupply,” or if “You’re hooked so bad and in so deep it’s the only way you can get high any more. If you’re in that bad, about the only way you’ll get out is when you OD.”

Because it was so much stronger, and the only way you could access its narcotic effect was by snorting or injection, it wasn’t uncommon that the first time OxyContin was used to get wasted it was also the last.

I won’t believe for an instant those geniuses at Big Pharma (in this case, Purdue) didn’t have a clue their latest safety barrier could be breached by any fifteen-year-old in the habit of stealing Grandma’s hip medicine. Oh, well… The great thing for Big Pharma—and physicians and the Gumma-mint— is they have a ready-made scapegoat in such cases. The junky himself. Can’t blame them for the reckless and wanton behavior of the weak-willed and self-destructive. The Press did their bit to raise public awareness while at the same time assuring us ‘Merica’s Best and Brightest weren’t being thinned out. Due to its popularity among white males and the first widespread OD’s showing up in Appalachia, OxyContin was dubbed “Hillbilly Heroin.” Fuckin’ hilarious.

Big Pharma as well as the other powers-that-be didn’t take this shit lying down—nobody wants to take the blame for knocking off scads of rednecks. After a few months, those little aquamarine pills stopped showing up on my desk. OxyContin wasn’t banned—as other pharmaceuticals of the same era, like Fen-Phen (weight loss) and Seldane (allergies) and a whole lot more—but it lost its place as the newest and improved-est painkiller on the general market. Prescriptions were limited to those with a terminal illness or elderly folk with chronic pain issues primarily associated with other significant medical conditions. This clientele wasn’t in the habit of tinkering with their medications. Besides, their time on Earth was finite in anyone’s book. If they suddenly kacked, there were plenty of other places to point a finger before anyone got around to snooping in the medicine cabinet.

So… we could all take a deep breath and find assurance that this big bullet had been effectively dodged, yes? Uh . . . no. Funny thing; while the main culprit had been effectively caged up, the OD rate didn’t decline. Percoset, Percodan and Vicodin reclaimed their spot on the list, and stronger than ever. Disclaimer here: My theory follows, and I’ve not seen any “academic” support for it. Here goes: Those folk who abused OxyContin and managed to avoid the undertaker had been effectively hooked. They had to find another way to catch that dragon, and find it fast. They had to resort to what was available, and during this brief but intense crisis, they old stand-by’s hadn’t gone anywhere. Just sittin’ back and bidin’ their time…

This was hardly newsworthy. But, take heart folks. Big Pharma wasn’t about to take a break from coming up with the latest answer to pain, and addicts weren’t about to give up in gettingwhat they needed. Changes were acomin’. And those involved in freelance pharmaceutical supply weren’t about to stand by and watch the “legitimate” pushers rake in all that cash.

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

Show me your junk.

Flip on the news. On any given broadcast these days, some talking head will bring you a story focused on America’s current scourge. This isn’t about the most recent social media head scratcher put forth by Dear Leader, but a real, bona fide and honest-to-God scourge, one that’s sweeping the nation. I’m talkin’ ‘bout the newest, latest and greatest of American Tragedies—The Opioid Epidemic. Every time I hunker down in front of the television and Lester Holt warns of the disturbing story his network is about to lay on me, I want to holler back at the tube: “Where the fuck were you guys fifteen years ago?”

***

There was a time when I’d joke that if it wasn’t for alcohol and firearms, I’d be unemployed. It wasn’t long before I came to realize this clever bon mot didn’t provide for me that sharp, short and sweet summation of life as a medico-legal death investigator as concisely as I wanted it to. Sure, it stood on its own and produced a few dry chuckles from those I graced with it, but this was not enough. It’s true that alcohol plays a huge role in providing me with food and shelter. It wouldn’t be unfair to assert ballistic mayhem has done its bit in making Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire a part of my life. Without it, I could well have to endure a life of TV entertainment limited to a “basic” package. The problem I had was that my little pet phrase was lacking. It didn’t encompass a full view of my employment. It omitted a very important facet of my career when it came to percentages regarding how I spent my time at work. It truth, it was an aspect of death investigation that provided me with more job security than the consequences of drunkenness or gunplay—combined.

Lengthening this slice of morbid humor to “If it wasn’t for alcohol and firearms and prescription painkillers and all derivatives of opium, I’d be unemployed,” just wouldn’t do. It didn’t “sing.” This from a guy you all know has one dickens of a time “keeping it short.” So, I dropped it altogether. I dropped it well over fifteen years ago. The media had nothing to do with this decision. They were still jerking themselves raw over 9/11 in those days. I was in no danger of being considered passé due to pop-culture oversaturation.

To be truthful, fifteen years ago the number of opioid/opiate overdoses weren’t as overwhelming as they are now. But… the signs were there, and that’s not hindsight. When I first started as an investigator, the types of overdose fatalities reported to us were spread more across the board, so to speak. The pharmacological spectrum of drug use that resulted in fatalities, both intentional and accidental, was more varied and consistent in those days. Opioids, i.e. prescription painkillers concocted in a lab, not a poppy field in Turkey, held a notable but not overwhelming share of this spectrum. Psychotropics – often cocktails of benzodiazepines and tricyclics combined with alcohol– were “popular”. Non-benzo sleep aids like zolpidem and Lunesta, and antipsychotics like quetiapine (Seroquel), clozapine, risperidone also held a notable place. This spectrum also included overdoses that involved gulping down any and every pill available, prescription or OTC (over the counter), with suicidal intent and relying on the theory that too much of anything ought to kill you.

The primary opioid culprits back in those days were the pharmaceutical products of Percodan or Percocet (oxycodone and aspirin and oxycodone acetominophen, respectively) and Vicodin (hydrocodone and acetominophen.) These medications are highly effective, both at relieving pain and killing people. In my first year or so as an investigator, these meds were almost exclusive in opioid fatalities. We’d encounter the occasional morphine or methadone death, and there were folks who either had too little respect for its position of power in the opiate spectrum, or too much regard for the opinion of it as a wimp on that same spectrum, and wound up dead for taking a generous handful of Tylenol 3s (acetaminophen and codeine.) Once in a great while we’d catch an honest-to-god heroin OD, but in the waning 1990s that was a genuine eyebrow raiser. Then along came a medication that was heralded as an answer to the problem of folks abusing their pain medication: Oxycontin.

Oxycontin is just oxycodone; oxycodone with a twist. Big Pharma was tired of being associated with the over-prescription and subsequent abuse of painkillers. Just because they made the shit didn’t mean they were handing it out to anyone who wanted to cop a buzz. They preferred the blame being directed at the middle man. Doctors, on the other hand, had no problem with Big Pharma sharing the heat. When it came to patients who’d been on a regular diet of opioids going on three years after an ankle surgery, and whose next need of medical intervention took place in a morgue, the argument was made, “If this is all you have to offer for pain control, don’t scold us for prescribing it.” Big Pharma’s answer to this was oxycontin. (I heard this from a doctor, a friend of mine who was doing an emergency medicine rotation through his residency. He stated this was more of an ongoing gripe than an any sort of official dialogue between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, though he asserted this had been an ongoing debate for decades.)

Like I said, oxycontin was just oxycodone, “new and improved.” To diminish—if not wholly eradicate—this drug’s appeal as a pharmaceutical joyride, they did some chemical tinkering. It was made “slow/time release” and “buffered.” This resulted in a painkiller that was just as effective when it came to dulling the “ouch”, but eliminated the “aaaahhhh…” associated with the parent medication. Voila! This’ll take care of that abuse/addiction headache. Who’d want to get hooked on a pill that won’t give you a buzz? Problem solved.

A couple years after I became an investigator, this new and improved painkiller started showing up in overdose cases. We weren’t given much info about this stuff. You might find that odd, but, as I’ve learned over the last couple of decades, the medical and pharmaceutical communities aren’t in the habit of handing out updates to medical examiner’s offices. I suppose, after all the testing, studies, cross testing and cross studies and whatever, they don’t expect the latest FDA approved pharmaceutical advance will be sending us any business. (This isn’t the sole bailiwick of pain control. Remember “Fen-Phen”? Pharmaceuticals are equally adept at killing overweight folk as those in pain.)

When the oxycontin started showing up, and at an alarming rate, if I dare use such cliché, we were a little taken aback. We’d heard of this stuff, but that’s about as far as it went. A little research and a few pointed inquiries shed a ton of light on this latest puzzle. The answer was should have been obvious, but we, least of all, hadn’t figured it out.

Stay tuned. I’m about to tell.

 

 

 

Ya doan wanna f*ck widda JuJu, mon.

New, not previously published. This is a brand-spanking new BLOGPOST!This is not a retread or rehash. This is all shiny an’ new. For reals.

In regard to my months-long self absorption I realize I’ve been dreadfully negligent. Shame on me. But, I’m reunited with my baby now, the band is back together and we’re about to tear up the casino circuit until a new record deal is on the table. Here goes…

***

In my early days I’d made a few comments in regard to how I felt about satisfying prurience and appeasing morbid curiosity. If memory serves, I was a bit haughty when it came to such gratification. On this, my “second incarnation,” I’ve decided to eschew all semblance of moral integrity and get right down to serving the lowest common denominator in whatever way I can. Gotta knock the rust off somehow.

Destiny. Kismet. Karma. All strong, powerful words in and of themselves. In some individuals, they carry deep connotations in how they view their place in the universe. Outside of the obvious– i.e. I decide to give mugging passersby a try as a part-time job and end up getting shot in the face– I don’t give them much credence  when it comes to cause and effect in regard to meeting one’s maker. No “butterfly effect” in my view of the Cosmos. I would be a liar, however, if I were to say I’ve never borne witness to a few tragic events that one could ascribe “destiny,” “kismet,” or “karma” powerful roles in the chain of events that sent some poor soul to the Other Side. Here goes.

“Don’t dare God:” I was summoned to a death scene which involved traumatic injury incurred in the performance of service to humanity. It happened in a small, rented warehouse from which a church operated a busy food-shelf. Every aspect of its operation was based in donations. The food, pallets and bags were provided gratis by congregants and local businesses. Congregants also were generous in providing time and specialized skills to the cause.

This charity had benefited from the donation of a pair of forklifts, provided gratis by a shipping company. These labor saving implements were not in “fresh-off-the-assembly-line” condition. They’d seen many hours of hard service and were in need of a little fixin’ up. No problem. One of the church members was an industrial mechanic. Tuning up such equipment was right in his wheelhouse.

This warehouse was just a barebones grocery store. It didn’t have a machine shop. There were no industrial hoists or grease monkey pits to facilitate the repair and maintenance of contraptions like a forklift. One of the lifts– per the pastor– had some sort of problem “underneath it.”  Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the mechanically oriented congregant was a “can do” sorta guy.  He came up with a plan.  The other forklift had been deemed mechanically sound in all regards. There was nothing wrong underneath that one.  The solution to access the “underneath” of the problematic machine was to utilize the operational forklift as a hoist. The forks were slipped under the counterweight at the rear of the defective one and raised about two feet from the floor. The forks of the malfunctioning machine were fully operational. They were raised to the same height, and a stack of sawn off railroad ties were placed underneath them. Those forks were then lowered until the implement was a level twenty-four inches from the floor. Its normal ground clearance was about three inches.

The congregant found this a sound solution, and took no further steps in terms of safety or common sense. The pastor, who was present, thought otherwise and voiced his concerns. The philanthropic congregant disagreed. “I told him I wasn’t  comfortable with him crawling under there without further blocking the forklift,” the undertandably stunned reverend related to me.  “‘We’re doing God’s work here, pastor,’ he said. ‘I’ll let Him worry about it.’ Then he slid under it with a flashlight.”

The “good” forklift had been more than adequate when used to move a pallet laden with potatoes and such. Supporting over a ton and a half of steel well exceeded this function. The hydraulic hoses used to raise and lower its forks weren’t up to the job. The pastor reported that the man had just finished asserting his faith in the Lord and slid under the machine when one of the hoses blew, showering the entire area with hydraulic fluid. The forks dropped and so did the load it was bearing. The railroad ties supporting the front end of the damaged forlift, in reaction to the sudden change of angle and pressure, shot out from beneath the forks they were supporting. In less than a second the implement was resting on its wheels, as well as the congregant’s head and shoulders. I mentioned its ground clearance was three inches, did I not?

***

“It’s the clothes that make the man:” I went out to pick up a middle aged fellow who’d taken a headlong tumble down the steps leading to his basement. Throughout the day, he’d been hard at work, emptying several canned twelve ounce beverages from the refrigerator in his kitchen. This had been his normal Saturday routine for over twenty years.  His wife told me it’d been at least a twelve pack.  When the kitchen supply had run out he was still thirsty, so he headed downstairs to tap into the reserve supply. His wife had been in the living room watching television when she heard the basement door open. An instant later she heard a terrible noise that she correctly interpreted as her husband bouncing down the steps.

When I arrived he was still at the bottom of the stairway.  The medics had been there and left, of course. They reported to the cop who’d called it in to us that, when they arrived, the man’s shoulders were flush with the wall opposite the bottom step. His head was folded tight to his chest. When they rolled him to his back they reported his head was “kinda floppy.” They put the heart monitor pads on, saw the telemetry, and called it quits right then and there. So, I did my part, took my pictures, talked to the cop, spoke with the wife. It was as we were putting him into the body bag before hauling him back upstairs that I took a moment to read what was on the front of his T-shirt. Emblazoned over an artistic rendition of a brimming mug was printed: “There’s no such thing as a fatal beer!”

***

“If you read it somewhere, it must be true:” I got a call from an outstate county we serve as Medical Examiner. The deputy reported they’d be sending the young victim of a truly spectacular traffic accident. This young man had enjoyed a meal at the local Chinese restaurant with some friends– the last people who saw him alive. He was rushing through his dinner, explaining he was going to a party after eating and there would be a certain lady attending he’d been dying to “have a crack at.” He did stick around long enough for a fortune cookie, and these friends reported he tucked the little strip of paper into his wallet before heading out to test his luck in love.

It was a late autumn/early winter night. It had been dark over an hour before this lad left the restaurant. His route to the party covered several miles of county roads. A freezing drizzle had just begun to fall. About halfway to the party his shot at getting laid was foiled forever. The deputy reported his estimated speed at the point of the crash was at least twenty miles an hour in excess of the posted speed, which was fifty MPH. It was on a long, left breaking curve. The curve grew tighter as the roadway progressed. The deputy further reported this road bordered a ditch, sizable  both in depth and width. About a quarter mile before the road straightened out, the young man lost control of his vehicle (a pickup truck) and slammed into the massive, ultra heavy duty guardrail that protected this ditch from guys like him. The deputy added that this stretch of road and that ditch had a long, long history of gobbling up vehicles. The cost of removing those vehicles and their occupants was substantial. To prevent this type of cost,  this whopper of a guardrail was put up three years prior and had paid for itself several times over. On this occasion, however, this stalwart line of defense had proved itself only partially insurmountable. The truck remained on the pavement. The driver did not remain in the cab. He was unbelted (regard for personal safety is ever the casualty of eager anticipation,) and the impact launched him straight through the windshield. He was recovered from the other side of the ditch, twelve feet off the ground and in the branches of a tree. Impressive.

When he arrived at our Office, he was routinely processed, just like everybody who shows up that doesn’t die under suspicious circumstances. In the course of this, his wallet was emptied and the contents were sorted and documented. Tucked in with his legal tender, a small strip of paper was discovered. It was the contents of the fortune cookie that had topped off his last meal. It read: “You will soon take a short but exciting journey to a peaceful place.”

 

Well, then…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feline-O-Cide and death with dignity.

September 13th, 2016.

 

This last Sunday I killed my cat. That is, I paid someone to kill my cat, a professional. This was not a “contract hit”, of course, but a run-of-the-mill euthanizing of a kitty whose time had come. She went out like cats often do. She was obviously not herself about five days ago and at some point went and hid somewhere in the house like no animal but a cat can. I looked for her over three days with no success, and then she just finally appeared that morning near her water dish so sick and weak she couldn’t raise her head. I’d seen this before. “I can’t heal up, I won’t heal up. It’s up to you to do the right thing. I’m ready.” So I did.

This also occurred on the same day our nation, fifteen years ago, suffered its greatest shock since Pearl Harbor. I’m not about to compare the putting down of a pet to that catastrophe. But, it did bring about some curious juxtapositions in my head about what it means to choose one’s manner of death, if that choice is ever presented in one’s life. I don’t want to prattle on right now about suicide– which is of course an obvious subject when it comes to the argument about opting for one’s own demise. Most of those I see are either years in the making, a long history of depression with previous attempts or gestures, sort of sad, foregone conclusions, or an impulse seen through with the help of a handy means (gun, rope, or easy access to a river or an elevation sufficient enough to do the job) and consuming enough alcohol to make it seem like a good idea. That day will come, trust me, and I’ve no choice but to brush over it today, but that’s not what I want to put a microscope on.

Taking my cat to the vet was nothing more that putting a quick and supposedly comfortable end to her misery. Her age was the biggest factor in not pursuing another option. She’d never been sick in her life, was well into her life expectancy range and what I saw, from past experience as well as knowing my own cat, was that any treatment option wasn’t going to give her much more and most likely was going to be just as bad as what was hurting her at the present time. The vet backed me up, but I didn’t need reassurance. I knew, and the cat knew. There are those that believe you ought to be able to do the same with grandma or old Uncle Pete. Hmmm… Another time, perhaps…

After kitty’s passing it became just another Sunday. Football, crappy food eaten in front of the TV, a beer or two and I gave myself permission to sulk for the rest of the day. In the evening while channel surfing I came across a documentary on the World Trade Center attacks. The focus of this program was on a photograph of a man falling to his death from the North Tower. He has since been widely referred to as “The Falling Man.” It was believed he jumped from the Windows on the World restaurant. This man was one of an estimated two hundred that fell or jumped from both towers that day. I recalled other documentaries from varying perspectives and points of view. One particular program I remember was a French film crew that had been following a FDNY station on an entirely different project. The sharpest memory I have of that piece was the firefighters and the film crew in the vestibule of one of the towers. Through the shouting, the chaos and confusion, you heard an unsettling noise, like a single, heavy drumbeat that was more of a “bang” than a “thud.” One of the film crew, in a voiceover, said it took of few moments before, all at once, the film crew and the firefighters realized it was the sound of people hitting the roof above them. Each sound was a life coming to an end, a life that not thirty minutes before was engaged in normal, daily existence. My thought at the time was “better to jump than suffocate or burn.” Watching the show on “The Falling Man” and the efforts made to identify him, I was surprised– astounded, actually– at the negative reaction people had regarding those who’d chosen to leap rather than burn. (Not to be gruesome, but the fact is that “burning” may have been too mild a term. Several floors above the inferno– estimated at 1000 degrees F in both towers– “roasting” would be more apropos.) To me, jumping made sense on several levels. I’d go as far as to say it wasn’t even a choice. Why would I stand, with several floors beneath my feet being consumed by flames, cutting off any possibility of escape or rescue,  and know I’m certain to suffer horribly until the darkness falls for good? Why would I gasp and choke for minutes that will seem like hours, blinded, choking, knowing how it was going to end? And, finally, why would I let whoever did this to me, put me in this horrid, hopeless situation, have this kind of say in how my life ends? I saw jumping as defiance– a final gesture of self-determination.

I sat in the vet’s office for over an hour with my lethargic, quasi comatose cat curled up in a towel on my lap . It was busy. Every time somebody popped in, to do the paperwork, for me to hand them a credit card or, “to see how you guys are doing,” they always left with the question: “Do you need a little more time with her?” I understand and appreciate the sentiment. However, she was suffering. I was not there to extend it. My time was the time I’d spent over the last fifteen years. Now that time was over and I couldn’t understand why I would want her to remain in this condition for any longer than she had to–closure?

In our American manner of striving to sanitize death, “dying with dignity” is inevitably mentioned. In a nutshell, you have a say in whether or not someone shoves a hose down your throat and lets a machine breathe for you until your heart stops… unless they can get a machine to do that work as well. Then you can lay there and wait for the rest of your organs to ultimately fail. You are no longer required to put up that kind of fight any more. It took a couple of generations for us to realize that all of the wondrous advances we’d made didn’t necessarily mean you were going to enjoy your final days. We spent two generations thinking we could kick death out of our lives with science. And for anybody not to embrace this and cling to the very last breath by whatever means was a quitter. You can die at home now. You can stop the chemo, the radiation, the surgery. You can state your ideals and follow through with them and take you last breath where and whenever it comes and no one will think less of you. On the contrary, you will be anointed as courageous, noble and… dignified. I’ve no argument with this. I’ve lived it myself with people I loved. It’s how it should be. We’ve finally come to accept that hospital sheets and sterilized implements won’t make the end of a life better– or less final, for that matter. You can concede that the end of your life is inevitable, and to face it on your own terms is nobody’s business but your own.

That is, of course, only if you let it happen. Taking matters into your own hands is another story.

The Medical Examiner’s Office in New York listed every death caused by falling or jumping as a homicide. I see no problem with this, though technically it is not true. But there is in fact a loophole, and they used it. One problem is that most of the people who jumped, or fell, were not only pulverized by hitting the pavement, most of them were buried by the debris– tons beyond comprehension– after the buildings collapsed. Many were unrecovered and simply declared dead when they were never heard from again. Another was there were no living eyewitnesses from the floors they’d fallen from to provide any “history.” There were witnesses, yes, but none of them in a proximity that they could be asked “did they intend to jump?” though the circumstances made it pretty obvious. Some did fall. Some on the floors that were in close proximity to where the planes struck were possibly pushed through broken windows by panicked and disoriented people behind them, moving toward fresh and smoke-free air. Some were seen to fall after attempting to climb to another floor. But others, a couple holding hands, a woman holding her skirt down to prevent it being blown up by the velocity of her fall, or the well documented and photographed positions of the “Falling Man” indicate a jump. The loophole? Homicide can be listed as a cause of death if it is “loss of life resultant of an action initiated by another party.” This was clearly, unarguably, the truth. But the public perception in these cases is undeniably divided. You can put whatever you want down on a death certificate, but what many people saw was suicide, pure and simple. Even from families, who, as in the case of the “Falling Man”, did not want them positively identified. Suicide was simply too much of a load to add to the agonizing weight already dropped upon them by this unthinkable event. Be it their core beliefs, their upbringing, or imagining someone they loved being so terrified, desperate and hopeless they were forced to take their own lives is more than they can emotionally accommodate–more than anyone should– and more than anyone has the right to judge. Other people, those who’d not lost anybody that day, most whose only connection was the television or other media and thousands of miles away, perceived it as “giving up,” “not fighting to the last,” even cowardly. They could accept the other victims as heroic, but prefer not to even acknowledge those that fell rather than endure the smoke and flames. (There were some that complained the media had no business showing people falling.)

The other side of this issue was that those people on that day who opted to make that choice had to answer to nobody but themselves. Their choice was to burn and suffocate or take the only matter they had left in their lives into their own hands. Did this make them any less “heroic?” Does a coward or morally shallow person opt for a ten second fall rather than die in agony and disorientation? Or do they say “I won’t die the way madmen intended me to. I won’t accept that I have to take this.” That, too, is beyond anybody else’s scope of judgement.

My cat lived her cat life with an “attitude.” She was anything but docile. She bit me regularly, even when I wasn’t asking for it. She never– well, rarely– drew blood, but it was a solid chomp, nonetheless. One you felt. She wasn’t de-clawed, either, and she wasn’t shy when it came to utilizing all the weapons she had at her disposal. I actually preferred the bites. One of my friends dubbed her “Evil Orange Kitty” when he, against my strong and repeated advice against it, reached for her while assuring me that “all cats love me”. He snatched her from the floor abruptly and brought her up to his face. Less than a second later he had a shredded lower lip and “Evil Orange” was a streaking toward the basement. Sucking on his lower lip, my friend managed to say “All cats but one love me.” The only condolence I could offer was “Don’t take it personally.”

There was none of that on her last day. She couldn’t even hold her head up, much less offer a bite or a full blown, claws out swipe. When they finally put a portal cath in her foreleg to administer the cocktail, she didn’t even twitch. She sat in my lap for over twenty minutes with a tube in her leg and three layers of tape securing it, when two weeks prior she wouldn’t tolerate my dropping a napkin on her back. She ignored it, and the veterinarian, who at last showed up with the loaded syringe. When the vet reached for her, the cat didn’t make a move, not a twitch. And as I watched the pink fluid disappear from the syringe, “Evil Orange Kitty” was silent. A few seconds letter she grew rigid in my lap, loosed a sharp yowl and took a full body swipe, claws visible, at the gap of air separating us and the vet. Then she went completely limp. The vet was startled. She said, “She must have been very dehydrated and it took that long to reach her heart. The fluid can ‘burn’ somewhat. I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.” But it wasn’t. On the contrary, it was comforting. I hated the idea that she may have felt one flash of pain, but at the same time she still had one vigorous and assertive swipe left in her, and she took it.

Please don’t think I minimize the horror and grief of what happened fifteen years ago. What happens to a pet no matter how beloved, is beyond microscopic in comparison. No, there is not a shred of comparison. It was just a moment that, in its timing, pried my eyes open a little wider than they’d been in too many years. When a choice as difficult as how to meet death is put up, when the outcome is inevitable and unavoidable, but along with it is the unfathomable option to alter the means of accepting it, and having the incomprehensible capability to alter the means and manner, it is a moment inviolate by something as trivial as an opinion.