A Lovely Day At The Coroner’s Office
A thought had occurred to me. Had the dead teenager been unattractive, would the tragedy surrounding her murder have been less impactful, and would we have noticed?
What are we missing? What don’t we understand? What threat or opportunity is flying under the radar, and we simply don’t get it?
Attention Is The New Oil
Attention is an exceedingly rare commodity and the gate to clearer thinking. Yet, it’s ironic; how attention and focus are at the center of everything in our lives; but were becoming less adept at using them to help us discover great things hiding in plain sight.
Ordinarily, no one searches for progress among dead things. But our days are not ordinary. They are changing quickly, they are complicated, and they need clarity and clarity doesn’t happen without attention.
I am a busy, public school teacher, and my clarity took place on a Field Trip with high school seniors to our local Coroner’s Office. I had taken students on this journey countless times before, and while this was a destination on the other side of bizarre, it makes sense. I teach Health and Life Sciences, and for young minds aspiring to careers in Nursing and Medicine, viewing the human body in its rawest form is an exceptional opportunity to learn. Albeit, the Coroner’s Office is an unlikely place to take young minds, it was a prime spot for seizing the attention of teens willingly exiled to the land of Tik-Tok on their cell phones.
Focusing on things that will lead to clearer thinking is becoming a challenge, not only for teen students, but also for their parents, teachers, and society at large. Although technology and our access to information has been a net benefit, the downside of Smart Phones, Social Media, and 24-Hour news is an attention span of a monkey on Crystal Meth.
Dead bodies and nervous teens on the verge of fainting or hurling their breakfast in anticipation of what they were about to see, were not what I had in mind that day. What I had planned as an otherworldly expedition to check out some cool science, ended up being a mindful urging for me to stop and pay attention to everything I had been missing.
Mining For Attention Among The Dead
Having arrived at the Coroner’s Office that day, dead bodies were stacked, literally, wall to wall, and in varying stages of trauma and decay. Death was on full display everywhere, and while I dreamed of fresh air, one body stood out from among the rest. In a room prepped for an autopsy, lay the lifeless body of a 17-year-old female reported to have been a member of a local gang. She had sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the chest; and I had seen this far too many times in the inner city, like a McDonald’s franchise on every block in a sea of unhealthy people. Some call it McMurder.
Death is intimidating, and I know it well, but not by choice. As a U.S. Navy medic, more than a decade in an EMS setting, and the loss of family and friends, I had become accustomed to wash, rinse, and repeat without thinking about it. I had set life on automatic pilot and didn’t question what I was doing from moment to moment. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other as good ole soldiers do.
You couldn’t ignore the gaping hole in the middle of her thorax, which was juxtaposed with the fact that she was a beautiful girl, with long flowing hair, and deceased. As if the young and beautiful are immune to a violent and untimely death. And although my mind began to shift to the numbness which had served me so well before, this time it was different. Maybe it was the combination of several things; a beautiful victim, the right students, and the right timing. But this time, something was different.
My students are my kids, not biologically, but I knew them well and they had a special place in my life. And upon viewing the dead girl, the shock and awe that registered on their faces was telling, and I thought some of them were on the verge of passing out, but they didn’t. They didn’t say much. They just stared. This was a girl who grabbed our attention and probably for the most frivolous of reasons, she was pretty and deceased. And while they focused on the lifeless victim, I focused on them. I had not planned it this way, but I wanted this to be a learning opportunity, and I wondered if this was more than they could process.
The Beginning Of A Shift
Absent this girl’s gang affiliation and tattoos, she looked like the typical prom queen or senior class president. She would have been the center of attraction, and would not have had a problem making friends. This was not the type of person my students would think of in the past tense, ‘She had the brightest smile and lit up every room she walked into!’. A shift occurred within me.
I was tired and I was under the assumption I had gleaned all the lessons I could learn about paying keeping my eye on the most important things. This is what former Navy Medics and First Responder do, we pay attention to what’s life-threatening, fix it, and move forward. I was wrong.
Just like the people who say, “I wrote a long letter because I didn’t have time to write a short one”, I was busy with a flurry of activity, and going nowhere. I was expending a ton of effort and my spirit was falling further behind.
Although I have never been completely able to wrap my mind around the shift that occurred within me that day, I think it was my students who got my attention, while I was trying to get their attention. There was nothing in what they said or did, but in who they were, (my kids). I think we all feel the need to be better for our children, whether biological or symbolic. Something so strange in a place so unlikely clicked.
It was the Coroner’s Office, and there was value in all that tragedy, and it was clarity. On that day, I inadvertently paid attention and stumbled on a purpose greater than myself. It was the kids who took me up on the field trip and the kids who were coming behind them the following year that I wished clarity.
Everyone one of us needs to gain clarity with which we can mitigate problems and identify opportunities that are not yet apparent. Paying attention to the little things around us will be valuable in helping us build the skills that will yield extraordinary opportunities among unlikely experiences, places and people.
For further reading on sharpening your abilities to find greatness where it seems hard to find, refer to the following books:
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment” by Eckhart Tolle — This book focuses on the idea of mindfulness and living in the present moment, which is central to paying attention and letting go of distractions. The author argues that true happiness and fulfillment come from being fully present in each moment and not allowing oneself to be consumed by the past or future.
Man’s Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl — This book is a memoir of the author’s experiences as a concentration camp prisoner during World War II. Through his reflections on his experiences, the author argues that meaning and purpose can be found even in the most challenging circumstances, so long as one can pay attention and find meaning in their suffering. The book is relevant to the themes in the input as it highlights the importance of paying attention and finding meaning in life, even in the face of death and tragedy.
Books & BBQ
This article was the first in a 3-part series that talks about the Coroner’s Office, and the unlikely gifts that may happen in unusual places among unlikely people. This is a project under the Books & BBQ label you will hear more about in the coming weeks.
