The Stretcher

It was a windy, blustery day and my son and I were headed out the door for a brisk walk with our feisty Flemish Bouvier- Labrador, Yara, before the wind turned to a steady, cold rain. I had noticed a large firetruck across our street about 2 hours earlier, and wondered what it was doing there. Now I had my answer. There was a quiet house across the street three houses over, where a woman who looked to be in her early to mid seventies lived alone with her little Pekingese dog. As I watched a man wheel a stretcher out with a body on it,completely covered up, I realized the woman had died just now. Must have been a massive heart attack or maybe a brain aneurysm. My son and I looked at each other somewhat numb. Our dog is very aggressive around strangers, so we decided to take our walk to the left rather than walk by the deceased woman's house where the ambulance and coroner were. As we started walking and the fresh breezy wind hit our face, we shook the silence between us, and tried to enjoy our walk. When we returned, our cheeks red form the cold wind, all the cars were gone from the dead lady's house, and the emptiness and sadness of what had happened to her hit me. I was surprised by the intensity of the sadness that engulfed me. I did not know her name. I just knew from a neighbour that she had lost her husband a few years back. The only relative I ever saw once in a blue moon at her house was what looked like a daughter. It seemed to be mostly her and her little dog. She drove this little brown sedan that now sat lonely in the driveway. Her house looked suddenly sad with its previously cheerful little flowerbeds and clean curtains and lawn decorations. I knew nothing about her, whether she had been a kind or a mean person, whether she had been happy or sad. Whether she had enjoyed a happy marriage or a strenuous one, whether she had a daughter who cared about her. I had only said "Hi" to her a few times as we walked our dog, and she was busy tending to the flowers in her yard. Yet, I felt an acute sense of loss. She had lived for years in our street, and now she was dead. She yelled at me once for walking what she considered too close to her mailbox. I answered her : " I don't want your mailbox, I have one of my own!" She didn't say anything further and that was the only exchange I ever had with her, other than the occasional "Hi!" or "Hello!". Today was the first day of spring, it was cold, but very sunny with a clear blue sky, filled with cheerfully puffy white clouds, the kind that made me wonder as a child if clouds like that were made of whipped cream. Death is so sanitized in our modern world. My husband is a therapist and is scared to talk about it or even think about it. I have dealt with a lot of death in the last 15 years, and to me it is a sort of mind companion, one I got used to, after the death of both my younger sisters and both my parents under terrible circumstances. I think death deserves respect, acknowledgement and I think I would feel better about the anonymous woman's death just yesterday, if her front door were draped in the beautiful purple and black cloth they used to decorate the doors of houses with where people had died and that I remembered seeing as a child in Belgium. If a beautiful tall lantern was burning twenty-four seven until the day of the funeral, and I saw people coming and going to the house where she was laid up in her bedroom, in beautiful drapes, as people came to view her, and on the third day, a hearse would pick up her body that had been by now embalmed and put in the casket, and the family and friends would leave from her house to the funeral service, where if it was an open casket service all her family and friends would say goodbye to her before the final drive to the cemetery  and the final good-bye and interment. When I was growing up, and you passed by a house that was draped in the purples and black of bereavement, you slowed down and said a prayer for the soul that had departed. People who lost someone to death wore a black armband for some time, so you would know this person had lost someone close to them. Death was acknowledged, and you wore black or grey for some time after the funeral as a family member of the deceased person. I agree that that practice of being in mourning was taken too far in the past where it became impossible for a widow to remarry, but I think in its milder form as I described, the practice of admitting and recognizing death was a good one. I shudder at the indifference today. Death was in our street and no one even knew an hour or two later. That indifference is fundamentally wrong. If it wasn't, I would not feel the revolt and nausea I do now at the death of a stranger.