The man who died

Tap-tap-tap. As usual, I was working. It was a Saturday morning of bright sun, a day we expected to spend relatively quietly. One of the events of the day was the delivery of a storage box, something we planned to pack for an impending move. An event that we did not anticipate was death.

So, after receiving a cheerful call from the delivery driver that he was on his way, I tapped away, and my four-year-old came into my office and said, seriously, "Mama, Dubya says that there's a man lying dead in the street and Dada's helping him."

Four-year-olds--or at least my four-year-old--have great imaginations. I simply didn't believe a word he'd said. In fact, I didn't quite register the meaning of what he'd said. Taking my hands from the keyboard, I said, "Say that again." These are boys. They play army games. They have forts and sticks and Nerf guns and huge, free-ranging creativity. Every possibility except reality was available to my mind to explain his words.

He repeated it. Then, urgently, "Come see!" Still disbelieving--so much so, in fact, that I didn't rush, I paused to carefully put on some shoes, I noted my middle son outside in his "fort"--and stepping out through the garage...I saw my husband there, in the middle of our street, someone's cell phone tucked between shoulder and ear, urgently performing chest compressions on the man who'd just arrived to deliver our box.

The scene that unfolded next was one of the two of us trading off CPR, waiting for the first-responders, of a teenaged boy who had, with his girlfriend, found the man seconds before my husband showed up, offering to tell my children to go back inside, of 45 minutes of CPR, pulse checks, and heroic efforts from the EMTs and firefighters, and of a few gawking neighbors gathered around, helplessly drawn to this tragedy unfolding before them.

Then, the EMTs finally strapped him to a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance. Even though I still saw a firefighter performing chest compressions as the ambulance door closed, the ambulance drivers did not turn on the sirens. They just turned around in the street and drove quietly, slowly out of sight.

The man did die. I went to his viewing to tell his family how his last moments had been peaceful, seemingly without suffering, how he'd been contagiously cheerful and kind. I learned much about him, his wife, children, sister, parents, friends. His love of life, his asthma, his tendency to carry a "man-purse," his joy in music, his obsession with college football. I hugged these people and held their hands and wished beyond all measure that we all could have met under any other circumstances.

And last night, TH--who has been candid about his sadness over this man's death--called me upstairs to him with his usual nightly litany: I love you. Sweet dreams. Come see me. I love you. Sweet dreams. Come see me. I always to go see him, invariably to be greeted with a tiny little "Eeeeee" and a comfortable snuggling in under his covers now that his final touchstone of the day had arrived.

Still sad in his heart with the man still on his mind, TH told me that he hoped that I would live for 50 more years, and I agreed that to do so would be fine. And then he said that he hoped that his father lived that long, too, and that when we died, we would die together or not too far apart, so as not to miss each other too much. I agreed that to do so would also be fine. He seemed pleased to have worked that out. I know that he had come to a new understanding of family and loss and relationships and wanted to work out a determinative calculus for us all, a way to avoid dying separate and alone, collapsed in a street.

That, my friends, is empathy beyond all measure. Empathy for us and empathy for the family of the man who died, not entirely separate and alone, but on a beautiful and bright Saturday surrounded by people who cared deeply about him, even if they did not know at the time who he was.