The Shadow(Carl Brooks) “I could not stop for death, so death kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but ourselves… and immortality.”
By
Emily Dickinson


The Shadow

A short remembrance
By
Carl Brooks


I was around eight or nine years old and relatively sheltered, even for a small town Texas boy in the late 1940’s. As a very young boy, my world was totally made up of life and the living, from my first waking moment to my last. Death was only a remote condition that visited only bad guys in the movies. Even then, it was a view that I witnessed from a very remote place. From that distance I couldn’t feel it, smell it, taste it, or see any close-up or personal aspect of it at all. I suppose, as part of my childhood socialization, my parents had occasionally taken me to the funeral of a deceased relative where I sat quietly and absorbed the heavy, somber atmosphere while the proceedings took their usual, rehearsed course. Generally, I hadn’t known the dead person for very long, if at all, since I hadn’t been around for very long myself, but I suppose that taking children to funerals had been proper training in most societies for millennia. If for no other reason but to demonstrate that there was a definite end… to everything. Regardless, I didn’t like it there one bit and never got used to attending them.

Curiosity made me look at the corpse in the casket. The person never looked like the person I had briefly known when he or she was alive. To me, they were not people anymore at all, but some kind of made-up replica. I had no direct comparison to who some of them were when they were alive and now viewing them as inanimate objects and dead… just lying there with no life in their closed eyes, most with the brief shadow of a Mona Lisa smile that the deceased had never intended.

My existence up to that point had been spent mainly in carefree days of exploring the world around me, enjoying every aspect of every layer of life. I didn’t think about death the way a stuffed person doesn’t think about food once he leaves the Christmas dinner table. There are too many other important things to think about. Besides, death waits us all somewhere way, way far away and over yonder… perhaps in Samarkand.

My mother, older sister, older brother and I all lived in a tiny garage apartment behind my grandmother’s house. Divorce had descended into our simple lives a few months before and we were the remnants of that dysfunctional condition. The small Texas town in which we lived was a safe and friendly place, even allowing small children to wander around at will with no thought of threat or harm from anyone. Those were the post WWII years of the late 1940’s. The big worry for us wandering children was that if we got into mischief, any one of our neighbors might take it upon themselves to render the proper punishment… on the spot, for our wrongful acts. Thinking back, there was a solid feeling of security in that aspect of “community.” Proper behavior and basic morality was enforced by all, and for the benefit of everyone, especially children.

Our grandparent’s house, as well as our small garage apartment, was located only a block from downtown Bowie and two blocks from the town hospital… such as it was. In my daily travels, I frequently passed the emergency entrance to the hospital. It was a foreboding, scary place with wheelchair ramps and medicinal smells emanating from the concrete breezeway. Scanning the area in great detail was a must when passing by, just in case there was something that small boys might otherwise be forbidden to see. Much of my short life had been heretofore lived in the security of comic book and movie fantasy, while goings-on in the hospital were real life… and death.

Being vaguely aware of death, up to that point in my young life, I had known people who were mostly still alive, sick people, old people and people who were recovering from various infirmities. Then, there were the few dead people I had seen at their funerals. But there was an in-between nether land… the actual dying of a person, a personal glimpse of which I’d so far been spared.

I was walking along the sidewalk that led directly by the hospital when I noticed a lot of activity in the street at the emergency entrance. Feeling the gravity that hung over the scene, even before I could see what was happening, I slowed my pace and moved to the opposite side of the street. A red and white ambulance was backed into the emergency entrance with its back door open. A chromed gurney had been removed from the ambulance and was parked motionless on the pavement below. I could barely see the form of a man lying in the white sheets. A makeshift I.V. had been installed on the gurney and there were dark red splotches soaking the sheets around his head and shoulder area. I stopped my movement toward the scene for just a moment, then, without consciously being aware of it, carefully edged my way closer. There was an overwhelming feeling that I was intruding on an intensely personal happening, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to see what was going on. A heavy pall hung over the entire scene. The dim light and very air surrounding the scene seemed to weigh a ton.
Without realizing my progress, I found myself within a couple of yards of the tragedy, staring at something I’d never seen before. I remember looking around, searching every face in the small crowd, as if to ask why the obviously severely injured man wasn’t being taken inside the hospital and tended to. The doctor’s face was very solemn. He looked directly at me. I thought he was going to tell me to leave the area, to turn away and not be witness to what was happening, but decided against it. The man in the gurney moved one of his arms and spoke very softly to the doctor. The doctor looked at the man with a focused attention that I’d never witnessed before, then, nodded his head slightly. He held the man’s hand in both of his, as if he was trying to pull him back from falling into a deep, dark pit. Seconds passed... possibly as many as fifteen, but it seemed like an hour. Unlike what I’d seen in the movies, there was no jerking motion, no falling of the man’s head to the side… nothing. Finally, the doctor checked the man’s heartbeat with his stethoscope, folded the man’s hand on his still chest and slowly covered his face with the sheet.

No one said or did anything for a long moment. It was the most intense, personal silence I had ever witnessed. Real time seemed to literally stand still. The six or seven people witnessing the death of the man seemed profoundly affected. Death had visited right in front of them… passed within a yard or so and moved on to claim someone else.

The ambulance driver pushed the gurney through the hospital’s glass doors. He was in no hurry. Even after the dead man’s body had been removed from the scene, everyone remained still… staring, as if their minds needed time to capture and understand what is not understandable. I asked the man next to me what had happened. He said there had been an automobile accident out on the highway and the man had been severely injured. The injured man had known he was dying and had asked that he be allowed to do it quietly… in peace.

After a few more moments, I began to feel embarrassed about remaining there, as if I had stumbled onto the most private moments of a person’s life. The man was not coming back to life. It was all over. I’d forgotten where I had been going and just walked along the shady sidewalks, eventually finding myself in my schoolyard. I sat for a time on the seat of a swing, thinking about what I had witnessed. I kept running the events over and over in my mind, trying to make some sense of it all. After struggling with my startled emotions for awhile, I began to cry. I hadn’t known the man, so there wasn’t any real feeling of personal loss, but somehow I felt… less than before. Something profound had occurred. Oh, not to me personally, but death had passed very near to me, brushed my arm, and the emotional weight that it carried had surprised me.

I never mentioned being there at that particular time and witnessing what I’d seen… to anyone. No one could help me to better understand death, or what it all meant. I had to work out some things on my own and that was one of them. I would eventually witness the indescribable horrors of death several times in my life, during war, but it’s kind of like your first date, or your first kiss, the first time is hard to forget. Yes, we’re all eventually going to die, but when you see it up close and first hand, there is something foul and sour about it, welcome only to the terminally injured, the very old, or very ill. We can try and outrun it, but it is always with us… like a dark shadow just waiting to swallow us whole.

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