THE SHADE
I keep a jump box in my truck. Have for years. When somebody’s stranded on the side of the road with a dead battery, I stop. It only takes 1 minute. Clip the leads on, wait for the engine to catch, wave off the thanks. Have a great day. Glad I could help. Then I go. Something about it settles me. A small good thing, done, and nobody owes me anything for it.
So when I pulled in to pick Savannah up from her volunteer shift at First City Art on Wednesday, and saw people clustered across the lot, a man down on the ground in the sun, I did what I do. Except this time there were already three EMTs on him, on their knees, doing compressions. The rest were bystanders, just watching. As I drove up I’d seen a woman running across the lot with an umbrella in her hand, and by the time I got mine out of the truck she was already at the body, holding it over him. That’s what showed me what I could do. He’s lying in the heat. Get the sun off him. It was the only thing left for a person like me to do, with the real work already underway in the hands of people trained for it.
Then I got close enough to see him.
Blue in the face. Eyes open. Blood coming out of his nose. Not breathing. No pulse for them to find. And I ended up standing over the whole scene holding a small circle of shade over him while other men did the saving, because it was all I had to give, and I wasn't going to stop giving it.
I’ve been trained for death twice in my life, and neither training loaded.
The Marine Corps showed us death on a screen in boot camp. Bodies, wounds, the worst of it, projected big so you’d stop flinching. They callous you over on purpose. You need to be able to stand next to a man who’s bleeding out and keep working. You need to be able to deal it, too. Blood makes the grass grow. That was the frame. Death with a job attached to it.
Before that, there was the church. I grew up Pentecostal in a room where a body failing meant something spiritual was happening. I watched a kid seize in school once, jolting, foam at his mouth, and the reflex that fired in me was to pray for protection. Not for him. For me. So the demon coming out of him wouldn’t come looking for a new place to live. That was the other frame. Death and the body’s collapse as warfare you had to survive.
I don’t live in that room anymore. I walked out of religion a long time ago and never looked back. Decided it was man-made, all of it, and I still believe that. And the Marine frame didn’t fit either, because this wasn’t a battlefield. This was a stranger. Witnesses said he was a patron who’d been walking through and just went down. Nobody there knew him. The police were asking around and getting nothing. He didn’t work there. He was just a man, in a parking lot, on an ordinary afternoon, forty yards from where my daughter was waiting for me.
So for the first time I can remember, I met death with no frame at all. Nothing pre-installed answered for me. And in that empty space, something came up out of my chest that I did not decide to send.
Call it a prayer if you want. It wasn’t the Our Father. There were no words. It was a longing. A reaching out toward something, a begging for mercy, please don’t let this happen to this man. And the strange part, the part I keep turning over, is that I had no reason. I didn’t know him. No connection. I couldn’t have told you his name or picked his face out of a crowd an hour earlier.
And I wanted him back anyway. Badly. With everything.
While the reaching was happening, my hands were still busy holding shade over a man whose heart had stopped. That’s the picture I can’t put down. The one useful thing I had left to give was keeping the sun off a body that might already be gone. Body doing the small real task. Whatever’s underneath the body doing the large impossible one. Both at once.
They kept working. Compressions. He pulled a breath, wet and full of saliva, not quite his own yet. Then the shock. His whole body jolted, hands flying up, and then nothing. Back to compressions. And then he started reaching for air on his own, and I knew he was back. Something in me had been cheering the whole time. Come on. You can do it. Come on.
When he came back, there was relief. And right behind it, a question I didn’t expect. Is a thank you owed here? And to who? Was he even supposed to come back? Who am I to have asked for it?
I’ve spent a lot of hours taking religion apart. I’m good at it. I can walk you through why the story doesn’t hold, why the frames are built by hands, why the certainty was always oversold. I stand by every bit of that.
But nothing I called out to in that parking lot was Christian, or Muslim, or anything with a name. It wasn’t muscle memory from the church. I know what that reflex feels like, and this wasn’t it. What rose in me was older than any of the rooms I’ve walked out of. It was the plain fact of being tied to another person I’d never met, and reaching, on his behalf, toward something.
That’s what I drove home with. Not a door cracked back open to religion. I’m not going back. What opened was smaller and steadier than that. A knowing that we’re connected to something, and that the reaching out is real even when we can’t say what we’re reaching toward.
The name was always the man-made part. The connection was never in question. I found that out standing in the heat with an umbrella in my hand, holding shade over a stranger, begging a something I can’t name to give him back.
It did. Or it didn’t, and three EMTs and a machine did. I don’t need to know which. I know what I felt, and I know it was true, and I know it didn’t need a name to be either one.