Witness

Yesterday I witnessed a man dying. This morning I've been fishing through the disordered pile of notecards I keep on hand so I can write a note to his widow. She's a neighbor of mine.

I heard a siren around 4:30 in the afternoon and then the powerful surge of a diesel fire truck rounding the corner of our block. It was the rescue truck, the kind that comes when you dial 9-1-1, and from a window I saw it slow down, as though the driver were looking for an address. It advanced slowly up the street. I held my breath. It stopped at a house across the street, a few doors up, and several firemen with a canvas stretcher and a big black bag rushed up the driveway. I called my neighbor Reina, and she went outside in the rainy late afternoon gloom with an umbrella to see what was happening.

An ambulance followed, and the paramedics wheeled a gurney covered with a yellow plastic sheet up the driveway. From a bathroom window, I could see right into the back of the ambulance, doors wide open, red lights flashing. The street was blocked, and drivers were making U-turns.

Reina and I were on the phone when suddenly the gurney came careening down the driveway and across the street, where it crashed into the curb and tipped over. We gasped in unison. It turned out no one was on it, and for some time it lay in the rain, white blankets scattered. Presently, two paramedics appeared, righted the gurney, and rolled it back up the driveway.

And then the final act, which I wish I hadn't seen: The gurney, this time with a person on it, guided down the driveway by four men, with a fifth pumping fast and furious on the person's chest. On the wet gurney. In the rain. I turned away. It was the husband of the couple who lived there. The paramedics collapsed the wheels of the gurney, loaded it into the ambulance, slammed the doors, and took off.

I wandered around my house in the near-dark, wondering a) why I felt compelled to watch, and b) what to do next. Afterwhile, Reina called and said the man had suffered cardiac arrest. Later, I googled "cardiac arrest" and learned that 95% of victims die before they get to the hospital. Today I found out that he had died.

I'd met this man only once, in his living room, while I had sherry with him and his wife and talked about a neighborhood matter. He taught at San Jose State, and it turned out he knew my dad, who was also a professor there. I didn't know this man, really, but I witnessed the last desperate moments of his life. For awhile, I beat myself up over being a voyeur, but now I think: I cared. I feel haunted by what I saw and also more unavoidably hooked into the human family.

Now I've got to stop so I can take a note and maybe a camellia over to his wife.