The autopsy is fairly inconclusive and our determination of the cause of death will rely heavily on the results of toxicology. The funeral home has brought in a few empty blister packs of Carisoprodol, a sleeping medication.
When I phone the dead woman’s husband to inform him of the results, or lack thereof, of our autopsy, I am anxious to hear the story behind her demise and delayed discovery.
I introduce myself and tell him that we would need to wait for toxicology results to arrive in four to six weeks to determine cause of death.
“We have a discrepancy,” I say, “between your account of when she was last seen alive, and what we found at autopsy.”
“How so?”
“Well, her face was green, and that indicates that she had been dead for some time.”
“It was green?”
“Yes, and also her skin was beginning to slough off.”
There is silence on the line.
“We sleep in separate bedrooms,” he says. “She’s an alcoholic, stays up late at night and then sleeps all day sometimes. She’d drink on the weekends, but didn’t want to drink on weekdays, so she’d take those sleeping pills.”
“I see.”
“But we have a good marriage,” he says, as though trying to convince me that his marriage was as normal as anyone else’s. “I go to her room, or she goes to mine…”
He continues, “I came home from work the previous night and she was sleeping there, with the little dog beside her. So, I figured she was tired. I just let her sleep.”
“Are you sure she was sleeping?”
“Well, I figured if something was wrong, the dog would let me know!”
I try to puzzle through how a dog would communicate that its master is dead. Certainly it wouldn’t wag its tail? Would it whine, bark, chew on itself? I have no idea.
“She was very likely already dead that evening, sir,” I say.
Reality begins, very slowly, to dawn on the gentleman. “Huh,” he says, chewing on the revelation. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I talked to her the night before that either. Tuesday. That’s it. I think I spoke to her Tuesday.”
Three days prior. That would explain the degree of decomposition we saw at autopsy.
“I think it’s likely she overdosed on sleeping pills, or alcohol, or a combination of the two,” I say. “We’ll probably never know exactly when she took them though.”
The husband thanks me and hangs up. I sit at my desk and try to figure out how to word my corrected report. And then I imagine the husband, sitting, newly alone in a house suddenly much bigger and quieter than before, phone in hand, staring out the window at the noonday sun, trying to rationalize how he could have mistaken something as basic as the demise of his wife for sleep. Maybe he wonders if he could have done something sooner she might still be alive.
If there’s anything the death profession has taught me, or for that matter, emergency medical services, is that one of the biggest fallacies is to assume that not only do other people think like you, but also that they will conduct their lives in a manner similar to yours. The definition of “normal” in a marriage varies immensely, from the stereotypical “happy” couple who see one another every evening and on the weekends, to those who are merely roommates, or who might maintain separate residences, or who may even maintain another relationship on the side.
Through the unique window into the lives of the deceased that death care provides me, I’m able to expand my perspective of what constitutes “normal” and “functional.” What is normal to some is highly dysfunctional to another. Even the prototypical “Leave it to Beaver” family may seem bizarre to others who have grown up in a completely different way.
I recall a case in which I investigated the death of a middle-aged woman who was watching television with her husband when she suddenly began vomiting a dark fluid, became unresponsive, and died. An image came into my head as I made my way to the call—a neatly maintained living room, much like my own, freshly vacuumed carpet, a newly polished coffee table with perhaps a book or two on top, and the dead woman, lying on the carpet, with maybe a small amount of dark vomit beside her head.
What greeted me as I walked in the door of that house I couldn’t have imagined. A wheelbarrow full of yard debris was actually parked in what had once been a kitchen. Dried marijuana buds sat atop a formerly white refrigerator and atop an island among crushed cans of cheap beer and the dried remnants of microwaveable dinners. Dishes that had been sitting in the sink so long they had developed several different species of greenish mold overflowed onto a counter whose former color was unidentifiable.
The dead woman herself, the subject of the investigation, was obese, nude, and lying on muddy composite flooring, smeared with dark bloody fluid. A couch, varnished with the sheen of years of body oils, hulked in the corner among the cobwebs. A urine stain marked where the woman had sat when she had breathed her last.
In my efforts to appreciate the decedent in situ, in her natural environment, my gaze fell upon the ceiling of what had once passed for a dining room. It didn’t exist, exactly. A massive crater, flanked by chunks of drywall, loomed above a dusty table. Clear plastic sheeting, an apparent attempt at a temporary repair, ballooned with the burden of an entire season of rainwater, hung low over the table like a burgeoning aneurysm.
When we went to perform an autopsy on the woman the next day, we found that the condition of her internal organs reflected the condition of her house—decaying, neglected, and abused. Her brain was atrophied from alcoholism; her liver, instead of being red and resilient, was yellow and spongy—a fatty liver, from poor diet and alcohol. Her heart, a floppy, misshapen bag of blood, was the result of years of high blood pressure and alcohol. Most striking of all were her kidneys, which resembled no kidneys I had ever before seen: gray, granular, and amorphous. It wasn’t possible to tell the right from the left.
This was her normal. I imagined the unfortunate woman, waking around noon and nursing a hangover with the hair of the dog, possibly wolfing down a stale burger from McDonald’s around two; the kitchen was impossible to cook in. Then it was time for a nap, followed by an afternoon and evening of watching television on a couch likely crawling with so many micro-organisms it would cause my bacteriophobic wife to become apoplectic.
And so back home I go to my neat and organized house, leaving my stinking clothes in the garage—both a spatial and psychological distance I put between myself and my work. And though my bed is unmade and my bills are unpaid, strewn about my desk, I appreciate what I have just a little bit more.
A Good Man
When I receive the call to investigate the death of Mr. Charles Rounds of 12256 Rounds Road, I am not even sure if his death is in our jurisdiction.
“Darrington? Is that even in Skagit County?”
“Yes,” the 911 dispatcher replies. “Deputy Campbell is on scene.”
That’s a familiar name, so I suppose the deceased gentleman lived in one of those odd areas in which a town is split between two different counties. Nonetheless, I have no idea where I am going. I ask the dispatcher for directions, and she gives me some vague description of an unmarked road somewhere between here and Egypt. Worse yet, when I enter the address into the GPS, it is nowhere to be found. I’m going to have to wing it.
I cruise down Interstate 5 in The Green Reaper, the radio on low, emitting Christian rock, courtesy of the last investigator. Loose plastic dash molding clatters against metal. I could really use a new van. Uncharacteristically for December, the sun glares. I had forgotten my sunglasses, or rather I have no idea where they are. It is said that sunglass sales explode in the Pacific Northwest summer, because everyone has forgotten where they put their last pair before the great plunge into darkness and gloom that lasts from November through April.
I’ve written the address on the back of an envelope that this morning had contained a bill from the power company. The envelope rests on a coffee-stained clipboard and a ragged list o
f phone numbers for personnel no longer employed with us. I’ve got to get more organized.
The only thing I have figured out for sure by this point is where to turn off, though I haven’t any idea whether I should turn right or left at the fork. On a whim, I turn left, and cruise towards, I hope, my destination. After about five minutes, I get worried and call the dispatcher back. She assures me that I’m on the right track, though she asks me for an ETA to the scene. I’m already about thirty minutes into this trip, and have God only knows how much farther to go.
I have no idea what my ETA is, so I randomly toss out a number: “Forty-five minutes.” That should be enough time.
About an hour later, I see the signs for Darrington, and am relatively confident that my destination is approaching. As I sail past the tiny town and back onto the winding and lonely back roads, I realize that I am nowhere near the scene, and my ETA has been wildly inaccurate.
The dispatcher has relayed to me that Rounds Road should be somewhere between three mile markers, but once I pass the final one, I realize that I haven’t passed anything resembling a road. Not one that is labeled as such, anyway. Back and forth I go along the same stretch, becoming more irritated as the minutes tick on.
I pull over and attempt to use the police radio on my dash. “Cascade from Union 301,” I say.
Silence.
I look down at my phone. No bars. The only thing left to do is to continue to drive in one direction or another until I get either radio or cell reception.
I drive east, nearly to Egypt, I suspect, and wait for at least three bars to pop up on my screen before I call the dispatcher again. She tells me I’ve gone way past the increasingly mythical Rounds Road, but she’ll have the deputy drive to the main highway to meet me. That would have been a fine idea in the first place.
Heading back west again, as short on fuel as I am on patience, I spot the familiar sight of a four-wheel drive pickup bearing the Skagit County Sheriff logo on the side. At last.
The stern expression on Deputy Campbell’s face as he exits his truck indicates to me that he is not in the least amused by my directional misadventure. As I roll down my window to speak with him, I notice that no road sign exists, not even a hand-carved one, to give me an indication of the location of Rounds Road.
“I must have passed by this road three times,” I say.
“Hmmm,” he says, and launches into a brief synopsis of the circumstances. “Elderly guy found by his neighbor. Last seen yesterday afternoon when the neighbor came over to help him fire up his generator. Lock your hubs. It’s rough going up there.”
Deputy Campbell gets back in his truck, turns it around, and heads up an incredibly steep, narrow, rock-strewn, pothole-ridden road. I follow in my front-wheel drive van and hope for the best. After a nail-biting ten minutes, I arrive at a rustic log cabin in the woods. Had this been winter and there was snow on the ground, it would have been impossible to make it up here.
I get out of the van, hang my camera around my neck, grab my clipboard, and walk to the open front door of the cabin, where I am met by an older man with tears in his eyes. I introduce myself, offer condolences, and ask the usual questions: How long had he known Mr. Rounds? Did Mr. Rounds seem to be in his usual state of health when he was seen yesterday? Did he have any family?
Stepping onto the porch of the cabin, I feel like I am stepping back into the nineteenth century. A handmade canoe hangs just to the left of the open screen door. Various ropes and vintage logging tools hang to the right, along with a huge and rusty two-man saw. Deputy Campbell leads the way into the dark, musty-smelling home.
“Interesting story,” says Deputy Campbell. “This guy was a mule packer. Everybody knew him around here. He and his wife were very well respected.”
Pelts and antlers hang from the walls. The appliances are ancient. An iron stove, which appears to be the cabin’s sole heat source, hulks in the corner. Tables overflow with yellowed documents, covered with dust. Pictures depicting a smiling older couple gaze out from the walls.
The dead man himself is not so easily identified, owing to the general clutter of the main living area. An upended walker lies in front of a dusty tube television, and beside that lies a thin man, facedown, his face obscured by a coffee table. I photograph as I approach. An empty liter bottle of vodka lies at the man’s stocking-clad feet, next to a recliner, its fabric shiny with the sheen of years of body oils. Beneath the body are several firearms, including a rifle and a holstered revolver. I need to check to make sure the body is free of gunshot wounds.
I turn over poor old Mr. Rounds and he emits a guttural groan, as the last bit of air escapes his lungs. His face is purple, the eyes tightly closed, thick gray stubble on his chin. His hair is greasy and unwashed. I palpate the back of his skull and find a small defect. He’s got a small laceration to the back of his head that roughly corresponds to the shape of the coffee table leg. There is no blood on the soiled carpet and no blood surrounds the room—a postmortem wound, sustained after his heart stopped, he collapsed, and his head struck the table. If the wound had occurred prior to death, or it had been the proximate cause of death, there would have been a great deal of blood. Likely it was a natural event that killed him.
The man’s legs are swollen, reddened, and swaddled in soiled bandages. He wears a pair of dingy underwear and a stained T-shirt. His atrophied limbs exhibit the stiffness of fully advanced rigor mortis and the purple discoloration to his head and chest doesn’t blanch with pressure. He has been dead about twelve hours.
I search the bathroom for medications and find only antibiotics prescribed to a long-deceased dog. Mr. Rounds, the neighbor tells me, didn’t believe in doctors and visited only rarely. Looks like I will need to sign the death certificate.
A search of the kitchen, bedroom, and living area reveals no clue as to next of kin.
The neighbor wanders into the house again. “This wasn’t him,” he says, through tears. “He was a proud man. He wouldn’t have wanted you to see him like this.”
The neighbor provides me with a phone number for the executor of Mr. Rounds’ estate, as well as some accompanying paperwork. He looks wistful. “After Chuck’s wife died, he took to drinking. We couldn’t get him to take a bath, but we just let him be.”
I go back to the van and return with the gurney and plastic transfer sheet. The neighbor leaves the room and waits outside. “I don’t want to see this part,” he says.
Deputy Campbell and I ease Chuck onto the transfer sheet, onto the gurney, and into the van. I close the heavy metal doors and turn to face the neighbor.
“I’m gonna miss him,” he says. “He was a good man.”
I step into the van, start the engine, and begin to make my way down Mr. Rounds’ eponymous road, past the trees he knew so well, on the way to the “big city” of Mount Vernon. It will take me over an hour to get the body to the morgue, but it is a peaceful trip, devoid of the pressure I felt responding to the scene.
The sun is going down, emblematic, I think, for the sunset of a life well lived, the first sun that will set in over seventy-eight years in a world without Chuck Rounds, mule packer, family man, fisherman, and homesteader. How often have I made this trip, taking the dead on their last earthly journeys? Bankers, teachers, lawyers, vagrants, drunks, and episcopal priests, all rendered quite similar in death.
It’s a dismal way to make a living, I guess, but a privilege at the same time. How many others have the opportunity to see such a diversity of lifestyle, the personalities of the dead reflected in their surroundings, the way they’ve lived, and the ways they have died. Ostentation and pretense go by the wayside. The secret lives folks have lived, never letting anyone else in, are laid bare by death, sudden and often unexpected.
Aria
She looks so much like my daughter. Both are nearing the conclusion of their first year on Earth, sprouting their first teeth, learning their first words, about to graduate from infancy to early toddlerhood. But my daughter
, snoozing peacefully in her crib, is alive, and Aria is dead.
The ER nurse had a different tone to her voice than she usually did, laden with defeat and sadness. “We’ve got a one-year-old. Came in with CPR in progress.” Terse and to the point, it was all I needed to know to be sure I would have to respond. All infant deaths are investigated, and all of them are autopsied.
My daughter, just learning to walk, had staggered to the baby gate, clung to its bars, and watched me descend the staircase to my van as she mumbled, “Dada, Dada, Dada.”
The trip from my house to the Skagit County Hospital Emergency Department is short but seems more gravity-laden than most of my previous trips. This would be the first infant death I had investigated since the birth of my daughter, and I am uncertain how I will react in what is, effectively, a completely different mind-set than before. And then there are the more mundane thoughts, the practicalities. “Do I have an infant-sized body bag with me?” (Yes, sadly, they do make those, about the size of a pillowcase.) “Have I got the Infant Death Investigation Form with me? Is the battery in my camera charged? Do I have the Infant Re-enactment Kit with me?” The Re-enactment Kit consists of nothing more than a vaguely humanoid cloth doll that a mother would use to demonstrate the position in which she found her stricken baby. It is good, I thought, that the doll had no face. Less to personalize the experience.
I arrive at the ER, packing my camera and clipboard full of forms. At the ER, the coroner is an unwelcome sight, especially when a baby has died. A Grim Reaper in cargo pants, I am the person nobody wants to meet, but without whom nobody can be buried.
The Removalist Page 11