I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

As time passes, my memories from my brief tenure as a police officer have grown dim and kind of fuzzy around the edges. Names and streets elude me now. I'm glad that I committed some of these memories to the BFZ rock pile while they were still fresh in my mind. Some remain as yet undocumented outside of affidavits and incident reports. This I intend to remedy at some point. Unfortunately some memories are still horribly vivid though. Like the time I kicked in the door to an old woman's apartment and found her decaying remains in the back bedroom, or the half dozen suicides I responded to. There was also the S.I.D.S. death and "Pie-Dog's" car crash down on the lake road. That's to say nothing of the dozen or so "untimelies" that I was called upon to document for the state. With latex hands and a screaming heart I turned them over, undressed them and ran fingers through their hair, looking for wounds. I noted lividity, counted medications, and diagramed the scene. Every corpse is filed away mentally, catalogued in vivid, macabre detail. I can remember feeling a sort of tingly, light-headed sensation each time as I walked into the presence of a deceased human being.

I want to be macho and say they didn't bother me, but that's not true. They did. They still do. Worse than the corpses though were the walking dead- men and women who were trapped hopelessly in their self-destructive lifestyles. The walking dead haunt me. They were slaves of compulsion, caught up and born along in a current which would lead inexorably to their own destruction. Every time I dealt with them I would come away with just one question- How's it going to end? I wondered if they saw the trajectory of their lives as I did.

I'm not sure I could help them, but sometimes I want to try. I know Christ is the only answer to their problem.