Today I Saw a Man Die

December 27, 2008

Today I saw a man die.
I went this morning to pick up Dayna at the airport. (She is here for the week to visit me.) I walked up the stairs to the “Arrivals” section. I heard a woman say, “does anyone know first aid?” There was a man on the ground and some security guards around him, slapping him and saying “Sir! Sir! Can you hear us?!” He could not. He wasn’t even breathing. What seemed like a common fainting quickly turned to life or death.
Everyone in the area didn’t know what to do. Stand around and watch or stay back and act like nothing was happening? Either way you felt guilty. Basically everyone decided to stand back and focus on anything but the man. Except for me and another woman wearing black heels. We stood by and watched.
A police officer came and began to perform CPR. The man was not responding. Heart attack I guessed. Everything seemed unnaturally calm, just the same it would have been had there not been a man on the ground- dying.
There was a blizzard raging outside and it took a little longer for the paramedics to get there, but finally they arrived. I remained nailed to the floor. They cut his coat off and his shirt. They hooked things to him and shocked his body. The whole place still felt unnaturally calm. Perhaps panic could save him. Shouldn’t there be some of that?
As they tried to bring him back to life I watched as a police man took the man’s coat and looked for some form of identity. The man was alone. His coat made me sad. Someone somewhere had bought that for him to keep him warm. Someone who cared about him. Someone who wasn’t there and who didn’t know yet that he was… well, was dead.
It was clear that the man had been dead for too long. They finally lifted him and put him on the stretcher. As they did so a woman wearing a green coat came around the corner. Shock hit her face and she began to yell, “That’s my husband! That’s my husband!” Her voice got louder and louder. Tears filled my eyes and my heart felt pinched. Some cops went to her and tried to help her. She collapsed. I wanted to move and run to her and help in some way. Anyway. But I remained nailed to the ground. I noticed that other people were around me, crying.
The wife got to her feet and ran out of the airport after her husband’s body. And that was that. I felt strange. I wanted to be traumatized, and I was, but I also felt like I was not the first person to see something like that and I’m not the last. And that it wont be the last time that I’ll see it either. Something that has kept the flow of the world moving. Death. I’ve experienced it’s effects as people I love have passed on, but I’ve never seen it happen. Something that so many people experience and I have just now seen a piece.
Some new people were arriving, unaware of the graveyard they just stepped into. I watched as I walked away. A woman hugged two children who just arrived. Another man hugged what looked to be his daughter. They shed some tears of joy as they reunited with their loved ones. At least they had another day, another moment to be together, alive. Did they know that?
Significance. I learned about that today.