Story Two

That time the eulogy wrote itself.

It will be quite some time before I get the smell of death out of my nostrils. Nothing seems to be working: Vicks vaporub smells like mentholated death, a lush shower bomb smells like vanilla and honeysuckle death. Food smells like garlicky death. Beer smells like hoppy death.

I was doing a photo shoot last night for a band that lives up the street from me. We were out back, playing with lighting effects and smoke machines, shouting lyrics over and over trying to get a solid one-shot video. There was one girl that nobody had seen in quite a few hours. But she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and everyone assumed she wasn’t feeling very social. Besides, we had enough people willing to be background to the performers.

Her best friend eventually found her. She had overdosed sometime yesterday morning. She had been in her bed for hours, her skin becoming bluish and mottled, her hands forming claws as rigor set in. Someone screamed, and I found myself running towards the sound.

There were four people there that I’d call grownups; everyone there was technically an adult but when you are nearing forty and you’re surrounded by people closer to your kids’ ages than your own, you tend to think of the young adults as still children. And what was needed was grownups, to clear the room and render what aid we could and stay with this young woman’s cold body and inform 911 and wait for the police to arrive. The kids didn’t need to see their friend like that. That was grownup work.

Tom was with me; he ran towards the screams too. We were looking at each other trying to explain to the 911 operator that CPR was not going to be helpful here. There was no way to bring this girl back into her body, she had been gone for hours and the room smelled in the way that only death-rooms can.

I am not particularly disturbed by death, and not even the death of a young person. I have lived in too many mountains to be surprised by an overdose. These things happen, and it is terribly sad, but in this society we have created it is also inevitable. It doesn’t have to be, it shouldn’t be, but it is.

I found myself more upset by all the police, who were very polite and sympathetic to the situation, and dutifully wrote down all our names before releasing us. It was clear that nobody had harmed this girl excepting herself, and that probably accidentally. It was probably fentanyl, they said. There will be an autopsy but the conclusions will not likely surprise anyone.

Some time in the future, weeks or months from now, I will grapple with the fact that I didn’t panic upon discovering a body but I threw up because my stomach turned knots at five cops being within twenty feet of me, even if they were polite. That is one of those observations one makes when one is in shock and things all seem a bit surreal and there’s an emergency and you are the grownup. It is a step removed from emotion.

This is no eulogy; I had met the dead girl perhaps three times in my life and we have over the last year or so learned to meet the deaths of acquaintances with a bit of wistful regret. We have become numb to death, learned that we cannot control its coming.

I cannot say I remember how she would make people laugh and feel loved, or speak about her endearing qualities. I only know her now as the smell of death and it will be days before I can smell anything else.

It is one of the great shames of our time that nights like that have become inevitable. And I wish it had been a Sackler in that room instead of me, smelling death and grappling with what their greed costs us all.