The morning had begun as all other work days. Log on, check messages, begin reading and tapping the keys. This was the rhythm of routine, a comfort in the well-worn path.
Mid-morning a week ago, I had slipped away from my desk to get milk at the supermarket. It was a necessary ritual, part boring, part virtual sleepwalking. The habit of the humdrum. Be back in a few minutes, I told the laptop and keyboard. Take your time, they replied.
Ambulances in the car park? That’s not good.Credit: Paul Rovere
Creature of such habit that I am, I parked the car in the usual spot towards the back away from the 4WD monsters and got out. A few rows away there were two ambulances, lights on, blocking the rows. That’s not good, I thought as I walked towards them and the supermarket.
I was right. A body was lying face up on the ground near the parked cars. A crowd had formed. The body was motionless. I was too far away to see anything but that CPR was being administered. I kept walking. I didn’t want to stay, couldn’t stay.
A sharp tingling ran down my spine as I moved off. It stayed with me as I entered the supermarket. It ran along the shores of memory, like a stick you might use to draw a line in the sand along the beach, and I was back, if not consciously, then at an emotional, visceral level to four years ago – to my son, the paramedics, the police, the stretcher ... the leaving.
I paid for the milk, got a takeaway coffee, as I always did, and walked back to the car. The crowd was still there, ebbing and flowing. A police car had pulled up. But it was no longer an emergency. A blanket now covered the body. Something else had arrived. Death. Life had taken its leaving.
The final act, plus one, was about to occur, the moving of the deceased into an ambulance. I walked back to my car. I knew nothing of the person who had died, but their place of dying. A small slice of time in my movements either side and I would not have even known that. I drove off. Waves were coming in at me from two angles. The wash of past and present was lapping my eyes and over my skin.
People have to die somewhere, of course, but back at home it struck me as somehow below what the dignity of a life should be that a poor soul should depart this life in a car park. A car park on a Saturday morning. But as Dylan Thomas might have written about the scene, Death has no dominion. The scene, in its incongruity of everyday life and absolute finality, was unsettling. The shiver down my spine only subsided like the tide later in the afternoon. That night, it rose again.
On the Facebook community page, people were talking about it. A name was revealed.
The tingling returned: I had known the dead person.
This was discombobulating to say the least. I felt as if I was in both hard-knuckle realism and washed-out surrealism. I had just gone down to the shops for a carton of milk and then, unknowingly, I had watched someone I knew die. It was like the day had fractured into shards of light and dark.
Rob was a friend of the family. He and my late father, both veterans, he of Vietnam and Dad of Korea, had been involved in the RSL. Rob took my mother to the annual Legacy lunches after Dad’s death. Every week of Anzac Day and Remembrance Day I would buy a pen from him at the local RSL stall he and others would man in the little mall of our town. He called me Rick, which is what family call me. He was Robbie to me.
Robbie was born and bred in our town in the Macedon Ranges, grew up here and now has died here. His family has deep links with the area. He was a great source for my wife’s history of the region. It was a comforting thought that, as she said, he would have died with locals around him.
Robbie’s funeral was on Monday. The burial service was at the local cemetery. It’s where my son’s ashes are. He was also born and raised and died here in our town.
Hamish McFadyen in May 2019, the year of his death.Credit: Warwick McFadyen
Surrounded by love and people of goodwill and heart. It’s a thought strong enough to help render over the cracks from that moment in a carpark on a Saturday morning when I passed through the humdrum of life, came upon death, and walked on.
Warwick McFadyen is a desk editor at The Age. He is the author of The Ocean, Meditations in prose and poetry on Grief.
Body in a car park: Death has no dominion, but a life remembered does
16
0
27.01.2024
The morning had begun as all other work days. Log on, check messages, begin reading and tapping the keys. This was the rhythm of routine, a comfort in the well-worn path.
Mid-morning a week ago, I had slipped away from my desk to get milk at the supermarket. It was a necessary ritual, part boring, part virtual sleepwalking. The habit of the humdrum. Be back in a few minutes, I told the laptop and keyboard. Take your time, they replied.
Ambulances in the car park? That’s not good.Credit: Paul Rovere
Creature of such habit that I am, I parked the car in the usual spot towards the back away from the 4WD monsters and got out. A few rows away there were two ambulances, lights on, blocking the rows. That’s not good, I thought as I walked towards them and the supermarket.
I was right. A body was lying face up on the ground near the parked cars. A crowd had formed. The body was motionless. I was too far away to see anything but that CPR was being administered. I kept walking. I didn’t want to stay, couldn’t stay.
A sharp tingling ran down my spine as I moved........
© The Age
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