Tuesday, 6/29/10 - Saving A Life

I would like to tell you the they arrived in time, that their ministrations averted the eventual, the inevitable.

I would like to tell you that they wheeled and whisked him and worked their wonders: staunching, steadying, stabilizing.

I would like to tell you that he is resting, recovering, recuperating, that his spirits are good and that visiting hours are from 8am until 8pm.

Yes, I would like to tell you these things. Some, like the visiting hours, would be true and good to know. The rest would be worthless, lies.

Jason Keegan died today at 2:53am and nothing I can tell you, no matter how much I would like to, will change that.

Technically, Jason died of a heart attack but the real reason he is no longer here is that he tried too hard to save his own life.



It was the robotic chattering that insinuated itself into my dreams and ratcheted me slowly awake. Unintelligible words like booted feet on gravel pathways ground themselves into my consciuosness. Snakelike hissings, starting then silenced by those same boots. The staticy sound of CB's and police radios.

And then there were the lights: torrid then frigid, flashing and forcing me to wake.

Awake. Then aware. And wondering: who?

Lying there a moment longer. Who? Neighbor's names reviewed, recent ailments recalled and recounted. Better to know.

Standing at the window surveying. It is Jason.

Dressed now and in the street I watch the EMT's: trained and trying. Trying not to save a life; that will come later. Right now they are trying to either enter or to extract. But each is impossible.

Impossible because Jason has saved his life in binders, in books and in boxes. Stacked from floor to ceiling, every empty inch stuffed with a recollection, a remnant, a remembrance.

Impossible because passageways are packed with pictures, postcards, posters, programs and playbills.

The stretcher stands abandoned on the steps. No way to work it into corridors curtailed by curios and cramped with clippings.

All available avenues in are, like his aorta, attenuated, atrophied.

A bristling and a bustling and a bucket brigade of boxes bursting and building on the lawn. Hurried, from hand to hand. A convoy cleaning and clearing. A constant cascading of cartons quickly, quickly, quickly... then...

...quietly...

...quietly...

... the coroner is called.

There is a shuffling of feet, a shaking of heads and a sharing of sighs. We tried.

They tried.

I stand by boxes abandoned looking at the leavings of a long life that lie now on the lawn.

As I walk away, I wonder, why?

Why?