Are You Okay?

There are many routes I can take to work but the one I use most often borders two states. On both sides are upscale neighborhoods – so much so that prior to his moving I passed by Patrick Mahomes house twice a day. As I was driving to work one morning I saw a man who appeared to be dead or unconscious lying in a bed of ivy in someone’s side yard. There was steady traffic on both sides of the road and I looked in every direction to see if anyone had stopped. It didn’t seem so and after driving a few more blocks I turned around and headed back to where I had seen him.

I had to park on a side street, and in a dress and shoes not suited for balancing on a curb alongside cars that were too close for comfort, I made my way towards him. Other than nudging him to see if he was okay I had no other plan except to call 9-1-1 if he was dead. As I got closer I heard the siren of a police car coming from the opposite direction and was only a few feet away when I saw an empty whiskey bottle. He was sleeping off a bender so I turned around and let the police do what they are far more trained to do than me.

When you find out your husband is dead at a police department, your life instantly becomes before and after. I have vivid recall of sitting at a white table in a white room, two detectives across from me telling me what I never imagined to be true, my hand flying to my mouth to stifle the screams. In the aftermath I was constantly asked, “How are you?” I had no idea how I was other than not fine. When someone instead asked, “Are you okay,” the door to how I was creaked opened – the question an acknowledgment that there were a multitude of reasons why I wouldn’t be and a safety net was there to catch me if I started to fall.

Last weekend we were home due to snow and freezing temperatures. I was under a blanket reading and decided to turn on the tv to check the news. Minutes earlier a nurse from the VA had just been shot dead after a woman near him had been thrown to the ground by ICE agents. He went to her aid and seconds later was riddled with bullets while a woman in a pink jacket recorded it on her phone and screamed through every terrifying second. The news was on for hours afterwards as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

Before I turned my car around that summer day to check on a stranger along the road, I told myself that it was a bad idea and I needed to let it go. I am not a good samaritan but rather someone who has been traumatized by a violent death and alone and on the ground will haunt me the rest of my life. For my own sake I needed to know whether the person I passed was okay or not.

On a frigid Saturday morning in a city eight hours from my own, a man whose job was taking care of others fittingly asked a stranger, “Are you okay?” Later two police officers would pull up to a house, knock on the door, and confirm to the people inside that their son was dead. Everything in their world would go dark while yellow tape marked his last minutes on earth – soon to be filled with flowers, condolences, a city paying their respects.

We watch this nightmare unfolding in our country and ask one another, “Are you okay,” already knowing that the answer is no, we are not okay. We weep for what we are witnessing while desperately trying to gather the most vulnerable into safety nets, our hands to our mouth to stifle the screams of grief.