We Are All Such Humans Here

All of which is to say, I don’t know why I said that about my various names when I did; Constance didn’t need to know, and she didn’t need to hear me wallow—she was an EMT with a dispatcher and a boss, places to go and lives to save and a worthwhile role to play—and she had told me she couldn’t listen. Nor do I know why I thought she might care, but she did. She stood quietly, came around to my end of the table, and put her hand on my shoulder while I remained seated and tried to keep the conflict of my emotions inside. It was the most human thing anyone could have done. Maybe I just wanted my suffering to be acknowledged by a stranger.

Then, together, Constance and her partner maneuvered my mother first and then my father onto their respective gurneys and began to push them outside. Neither were particularly heavy, but both had begun to stiffen to some degree, and while their limbs were still somewhat pliable, they weren’t entirely dead weight either. My father’s right hand kept rising, no matter what was done with the sheet.

The neighbors to the north stood on their lawn and whispered to each other behind their hands while my parents’ covered bodies went by. The Greenhavens, those goody-two-shoes Baptists. Not my parents’ favorite people, and the feeling was mutual.

“I’m sorry,” Constance said when the back of the ambulance was closed. “But we have forms that you need to sign.”

“There’s always paperwork,” I said, “in the best of times and the worst of times. Why should this be any different?”

“Do you have family around?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Some cousins on the other side of the country.” I gestured to the back of the ambulance. “But here, I’m the last one standing.”

“Well, look.” She appeared perplexed. “I’m no therapist, but you look like you need to call someone. Even if they’re on the other side of the world. You can’t just joke it away. You know what I mean?”

“Sure, I’m a fifty-year-old orphan of the coddled middle class,” I said. “A Boomer with zero resilience and fewer inner resources. I don’t give myself two chances in ten to pull it together.”

“I mean it.” She thought I was being flip, but she didn’t understand how serious I was. “I mean it,” she said, “you need to have someone to confide in.”

“I get it,” I said. “Five minutes before you folks arrived, I was hanging up the phone to my cousin Francis, but I still need to have a serious boo-hoo in a safe space. I mean that seriously. I’m as serious as a, well, I’m as serious as it gets. That’s what I mean.”

And with that, a squad car finally arrived.