You know what’s crazy. I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The conflict.
A 36 year old woman dies. She is slumped over on the couch. Her eyes are open, fixed and dilated. Her gaze is forever, staring into an interminable infinity. Authorities will later report the skinny, raw nerve of a woman is veiny and blue. Her skin is cold to the touch. Rigimortis has set in.
The young woman will be found by her 3 school age kids.
I am not there, but I am told it is a horrific moment.
“Hey mom, we’re late for school, Mom!”
How can finding you mother dead, slumped over on the couch be anything but life altering.
MOM WHERE’S MY BACK PACK.
OH MY GOD.
MOM IS DEAD.
This moment is a car T boning your life on a leisurely Sunday drive.
It’s crossing the tracks only to be plowed down by an angry locomotive.
WAM.
Life is unforgiving. The universe gives and then like a laughing yo yo of raw insidiousness, it simply reaches out and extinguishes the fire.
Seeing your mother dead on the couch, slumped over like a piece of slaughtered meat. It’s a stain that will irreparably alter your memories for the rest of days.
I am told the children, ages 14,13 and 9 were late for school.
They entered the mother’s room in the tiny, cluttered house.
They probably said something like “mom. mom. wake up. wake up. We gotta get to school.”
That’s when the children realized being late for school was going to be the least of their problems.
The 13 year old daughter chokes back tears as she describes that moment to me on the phone.
“She was crumpled over. She was blue. She was veiny.”
I am sad as I listen to the young girl. I am not sure I want to air her interview, even though both she and her grandmother have authorized me to do so.
Her words are so cold, so clinical. I know that she is masking her thoughts, her emotions. I know she is in mourning, in shock.
I will not use this part of the interview.
“What do you want people to know about your momma?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says searching her thoughts cluttered like a clothes dryer filled with anguish.
“How will you remember her?” I ask again.
“That she was a young beautiful woman.” She pauses. I hear her lips quiver and her voice break. I hear the tears and her effort to rain it all in, to be the adult of her family.
“I will miss her so much.”
She breaks down. She can hold it no longer. The little girl who has lost her mother explodes in a waterfall of emotions.
“That’s OK honey. That’s OK.”
I want to put my arm around her, but I’m on the other end of a cell phone parked on a country road that is more like a 3rd world nation than America.
I stare at the crime scene from my front windshield.
There is a no trespassing sign in the driveway so I stay parked across the street.
Nobody is in the house anyway. The little girl on the phone is at her grandmother’s house somewhere else in this backwards county.
As the child gathers herself, I stare out my windshield. It’s like a reality TV show. I half expect Dog the Bounty Hunter to jump out of a black sedan and kick in the door.
The driveway is dirt and gravel. The yard is sporadic weeds and clumps of something green that makes me sneeze. There are 3 cars in the front yard. They are parked haphazardly as if they were dumped out of God’s toy box.
But the eye catcher in this visual menagerie is the 5 foot tall sign shaped like an ISIS terrorist. The image is wearing a Middle Eastern head garb and clutching an AK47. The sinister sniper is crouched, his plywood weapon trained on anyone who would dare approach.
The sign is hideous. It is unbelievably large and shocking.
If social sophistication can be assessed from a vantage point across the street, I would say I am looking at a home infested with morons who chew on hayseeds and brush their teeth from jugs with XXX on the front.
You don’t have to know how to read to know what this signs says.
It’s a terrorist leveling an automatic weapon at me. It comes from the Al Qada gift collection.
It screams GO AWAY OR DIE.
ISIS lawn art is most certainly an HOA violation I muse to myself.
I listen to the little girl sniffle.
“You doing OK, honey?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says pulling herself together.
I think about how horrible that moment must have been for this child. She wakes up. she has all the worries of any middle school kid. Where’s my homework? What do I wear? Does the boy in math class think I’m cute.
And then suddenly; mom is cold and slumped over.
It’s overwhelming.
Just then a chicken crosses the road.
No seriously. This really is happening. I have to do a double take. I would laugh out loud, but I’m alone in the car and the little sniffling sad girl is on the other end of the phone.
I watch as the chicken’s head bobs back and forth like a dancer from Saturday Night Fever.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the other side.
I smile. That’s exactly what is happening.
“I’m going to put my brother’s note in mom’s coffin,” the little girl says after a long pause.
I stare at the tree limbs set against the dark swirling sky.
The clouds are low and the last day of winter still has a stranglehold on this bucolic stretch of Cheatham County.
Ah yes, the note.
That’s why I am here.
A woman dying is not necesarrilly a news story. It’s sad, but life is sometimes sad. But that doesn’t always mean it needs to be on TV.
But this story is different.
In this case, the sheriff of the county posted this sad tale on his Facebook page.
The sheriff called the 36 year old’s death a drug overdose. The sheriff talked about the raw emotions inside the tiny home as the woman’s 9 year old handed a note to his deputy.
The note simply said; “I love you mom.”
“Give that to my mom” the 9 year old reportedly said.
“It brought my investigators to tears,” the grizzled law man tells me from his Spartan office in Ashland City.
The sheriff says grown law men had a tear in their eye. He tells me that today is the 9 year old’s birthday. Men wearing stars on their chests asked the little boy what he wanted and then the deputies reportedly went out and bought him gifts.
A sad day for children who don’t deserve to be sad.
The sheriff wants to draw attention to the drug problem in his county. His intention are pure.
He will call the mother’s death a drug over dose on Facebook. He will say this is another example of why his office is going to take down the drug dealers.
The family tells me this is in bad taste.
“They don’t want people to think their mom died from a drug overdose,” the grandmother will tell me on the phone.
She is choking back tears. The morning has been as chaotic as it can be for this grandparent.
“I’ve never dealt with anything like this before,” she tells me. “the funeral is going to cost around six thousand dollars. She wants to be cremated.”
Me Maw has lost her daughter and now at the age of social security she has to be a mother again to 3 children.
The world has just dealt her cards from the bottom of the deck.
Why does the world do that?
I stare out my windshield and I feel hollow.
I watch a neighborhood mutt walk down the middle of the black top. It just stares at me as it walks down the double yellow stripe that splits a community that belongs on a red cross poster.
The dog knows I shouldn’t be here. The dog knows something is wrong in the universe this morning.
The dog hops over the drainage ditch and disappears behind an out building.
The sheriff is probably right, but the family wants respect. The autopsy hasn’t come back yet and the grandmother tells me that the woman has medical issues.
“The sheriff shouldn’t have said that,” Me Maw says. “She’s been real sick. We don’t know the cause of death yet.”
Me Maw is right. The sheriff is probably right too.
Christ that chicken and that stupid dog have as many answers as anyone right now.
As I drive away, I take one last look at the littered house and the junk cars on the yard.
I stare at the angry eyes under the mask of the No trespassing terrorist.
ISIS No Tresspassing signs are effective, I think to myself. Kept me from going up the driveway.
If only the drug dealers got the message. If only the harbinger of death saw it.
Maybe then 3 kids could have gone to school today worrying about stupid stuff like whether their backpacks are cool enough.
Now they have to decide where to scatter mom’s ashes.
Life’s Crazy™