On Death

A man died at the Market Street seafood counter tonight. I was saved from the sight by a random bowel movement. It's okay, though, I'll see him when I go in tomorrow.

Yes, you read that right. I am going to see a dead man at work tomorrow. That wasn't an attempt to be funny-haha Morgan either (I suppose it's a very dry, very blue attempt).

So here's the story.

I was assigned quite a few extra duties tonight as the head honcho of our store's meat department is coming in to inspect the market tomorrow morning. One of these duties was bleaching the floors of a big vault we have to the left of the market. I got the bleach from our storage area, and just before I went to get the scrubbing brush from over in seafood, I had a thought.

"I really need to take a shit."

And so I did. It seems a bit odd to be thankfulohsothankful for needing to give Cleveland a Super Bowl ring (non-in-the-know people, the football team in Cleveland is called the Browns... taking the Browns to the Superbowl... superbowl meaning...you get the idea), but it saved me from witnessing something truly horrible. As soon as I was finished with my doodies (as opposed to duties. lazy joke, I know), I went to go fetch the scrubbing brush from Seafood. Just as I went through the double doors to the market area, one of my managers, Chris, told me to finish making the chicken kebabs that one of the meat guys, Eric, had started.

I looked around to see where Eric was, wondering why he couldn't make his own damn kebabs, and found him standing in Seafood... next to a crowd of paramedics and several of the store managers. They were huddled around someone laying on the floor. I recognized them as Jose, a guy who works in seafood.

From what I gathered in the confusion that followed, Jose had been opening a box with a knife resembling a machete that Seafood uses to cut big fillets of fishes like Salmon and Halibut. When he opened it, his arm and in turn the knife followed through, stabbing deep into the wrist he was using to stabilize the box. When I say deep, I want you to think in terms of the Marianas Trench: the bone was showing.

Jose is such a diligent worker that he went all Black Knight and insisted he was okay. From what the Seafood manager Bobby told me later, he filled an X-Large plastic glove (the largest we have) with blood. This guy was bleeding. Badly. He insisted he was okay, and just as Bobby went to call for someone to come and give him stitches, Jose collapsed inside the freezer fault.

He was unconscious, foaming from the mouth, and still bleeding pretty badly. Eric, Chris, and Bobby had to lift him out of the freezer. If I'd been there, I would've had to as well. Carrying the limp body of someone I work with out of a freezer. That's not an image I want to be stuck with for the rest of my life.

Eric, Chris, and Bobby were all pretty shaken up afterwards. Apparently in the panic of the whole experience, Jose had stopped breathing and didn't have a pulse or heartbeat for about 40 seconds. He was effectively dead for almost a minute. When he woke up, he told Eric and Bobby that he had "been on a long, dark walk". This freaked them out a whole lot.

I've seen the scientific explanation for those kinds of out-of-body experiences, but in my short time on this Earth I've learned enough not to tell a man who's just come back from death, or someone who's seen him do it, that the thing he thinks saved him isn't what actually did and is completely false. There are times for atheist diatribes, and this wasn't one of them.

I had to cover for him while everyone was catching their bearings. I thought about it all for a second. It hadn't, and still hasn't, set in that someone I see on a near-daily basis died. I started wondering about death and, as it is prone to doing, my mind started racing through all of the terrible scenarios imaginable. The images of my friends and family dying started flashing through my head. Terrible, horrible images. Luckily, before I started to curl into an insane little ball, my mom showed up at the store. Normally I don't entirely enjoy it when my mom starts embarassing me in front of complete strangers, but when she started joking around with one of the "guests" that had asked for some Grouper, acting like a dissatisfied customer to get a rise out of me, I felt as if some great weight had been lifted off my chest.

I know that the next time I go out onto an ice rink and take a slapshot, the shockwave that ripples up from the fiberglass stick into my arms will feel like a warm blanket hugging them tightly. I know that when I sit down at my lunch table tomorrow and start joking with my friends, every chuckle will feel like a side-splitting laugh. I know that when I see my dog tomorrow when I come home from school, the unconditional love she gives me will overwhelm me.

I know these things because life suddenly has a whole new added dimension of fragility. At any second, what I love most could be taken from me.

It's times like these I wish I had the faith to say that it will all be better in the next life.