Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
#36 of 92: Me and the M.E. Never Met
I skipped the class field trip to the medical examiner’s office yesterday.
At first, when I saw the field trip on the syllabus for my Death & Dying course, I thought, hey, I can do that. It’ll be interesting. I’m into public health and know that the ME is often the first line of data collection about plagues and all that. Car wrecks, overdoses, all the tragedies. Overflowing.
But even though Milwaukee County has built a brand-new facility that I’m told is state of the art and absolutely pristine, I knew it would smell of death in some undetectable by other people way. I would smell death there. I woke up yesterday and thought. I can’t go there.
The instructor didn’t mind when I opted out. She looked right at me last week in class and practically invited me to opt out, not by name, of course, she is too professional for that. But she’s also a social worker so she is always looking out for everybody and maybe especially me. That’s nice. I don’t mind. There are times when I need looking out for.
In other news, this afternoon’s school pickup featured wind, rain, and cold. I stood in my sturdy Street Angels fleece holding my new push button umbrella and watched one five-year-old after another come bounding through the door, dressed in their heavy hoodies and winter parkas. Our girl walked out in a short-sleeved red Sylvester shirt and her beloved grey ‘jean pants.’ When asked, she had no idea where her sweatshirt or jacket were. “I lost them,” she said, oh, so serious, and so, we raced down the street to the car while I felt the eyes of a dozen right-age parents. Grandma can’t even dress that girl right. Nobody looked at me. Everyone’s too nice. It was just my disembodied self.
If you suspect my mind’s all over the place, you would be right.
I went to Street Angels this afternoon to roll and label pants. There is a trick to rolling jeans that involves tucking in the crotch. That’s something I learned today. The jeans are rolled and labeled so outreach workers can reach for them quickly, not have to rifle through a pile of stuff. I rolled maybe three dozen. It was a lot of pants.
Tomorrow, I plan on focusing.
One Comment on “#36 of 92: Me and the M.E. Never Met”
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I think rolling pants sounds like just the right kind of focus.
When my sister died, I asked the sheriff if I needed to identify her body at the morgue, and he said I’d seen way too much TV; that you don’t do it like that. I don’t remember the way we did it that day, but thank goodness it wasn’t like on TV. Years earlier when she’d tried unsuccessfully to kill herself and her body was on life support, waiting for her organs to flush out the toxins so they could be donated, I took our mom to see it, and it was worse than TV. I’ll spare you (and your readers) any details. My point, though, is wondering what it was your field trip actually did. If you hear tell of that, would you mind sharing?