I found myself sitting and staring at a body hanging above my stairs. Now that I have come to I thought I should write something. I feel like I’m about to be overwhelmed with emotion. Sadness mostly. Tears are gnawing at the edges of my eyes. Moments like these I usually retreat to the bathroom for a few minutes. A 14 year old boy found his dad hanging in the stairs when he got home. The man had used that red tuck tape to bind his ankles, cover his airway and had managed to work some of the roll around his wrists, the rest of the roll hanging still attached. A ladder was toppled at the bottom of the stairs. He was hanging by a crude yellow rope noose that hung from a beam in the exposed ceiling. The house was being renovated. Obvious death to us, but not his son. The moment when life lets someone down that monumentally is powerful. Being part of those moments developed a “defences up, soldier on” mentality. Entertaining all the unpleasant feelings seemed ridiculous. I truly felt I didn’t need to. Even when the feelings started creeping in during quiet moments I still refused for as long as I could, medicating them away. It wasn’t my job to feel what was going on.

Turns out I did feel though. At times it was sad or scary or angering. I feared those feelings the most. They were weakness, a transgression of capability. I felt embarrassed having those feelings over the routines of my job. Sometimes it was going to be tragic or gruesome but knowing that didn’t teach me to deal with that. I kept quiet, fearing the stigma of expressing feelings. I self-destructively coped. All I wanted to do was forget. I could keep working as long as I could do that. The problem with trying to forget is that it isn’t once and done. Memories are stubborn, and I became their stereotype.

I’m not going to forget. I can’t. I will always see, hear and smell things that trigger me. To what degree is all I can change. Control is feeling. Control is not letting the emotion cause panic. In a perfect world.