Lately I have been thinking a lot about how the job affected
me in addition to life experiences in general. I have never handled loss well, but then again
I have been losing people I care about since a young age. I watched my grandfather die from metastatic
cancer in my childhood home. I lost a good friend to a savage serial killer in
my early teens. It just seems that my husband, our kids and myself have all
lost so many people over the years. Even
my kids are no stranger to such loss. Losing many of their friends in car
accidents. Losing my mother unexpectedly and my father to suicide by gunshot.
It was me who found him. In a sad twist of fate, I worked over 15 suicides in
the year before and year after my dad’s suicide and most of them were of course
by gunshot. The cases after my dad’s death often caused me flashbacks and made
it very difficult for me to get/keep the image of my dad out of my head. It
benefited the family members of the suicides to hear my story and that I had
been through what they were now experiencing but it did not help me to keep
retelling my story. So why did I?
Because in my heart I had to do what was right and if my story and my
pain could help these people, then I felt I needed to do it.
What I am going to say next will not make sense to some
people, but losing my dogs over the years has been extremely traumatic to me as
well. I have been there for each death,
but one. I held them until they were gone so they did not have to go
alone. The one I did not attend, my
husband and oldest daughter did. I just couldn’t handle it at the time. Since
that time, it has not gotten any easier.
I came to depend on my dogs for emotional support. I have issues
trusting people, because people let you down, they tell your secrets, they
ridicule you when they do not understand you and dogs do not do any of those
things. They just love you and
appreciate every minute of attention you give back. When my Bailey began having seizures, and the
medications stopped working, we knew we did not have a choice. Nothing could stop the seizures that day and
when it was time to put her to sleep, I lay nose to nose with her. I sobbed
uncontrollably for some time after that and wondered if I could love another
dog. As I written about her before, next came my boy Bishop and now my baby
girl Tessa. I admit I get extremely anxious when I am away from my dogs. As I
type this now, Tessa is snuggled up to my side and snoring loudly. A sound I find comforting, just as I find my
husband’s snoring comforting too. Earlier, I saw a dog video on Facebook about
a dog and it made me cry and my boy Bishop heard me, came and put his paw on me
and licked my tears. Dogs know. And they just want to make it better.
I have never dealt with loss well and I realize now the job
did a number on me because I feel like all the kids and loved ones I had worked
on and investigated became a part of me and at the same time took a piece of
me. I now live in fear. Every minute of every day I fear someone I love will be
taken from me. It creates an incredible anxiety, one I can’t put into words
right now but it makes me panic, sometimes it makes it hard to breathe, I need
to know my loved ones are ok. Sometimes in my anxiety I start
physically/emotionally reliving the trauma of my past losses. I can’t remember
where I put my car keys or what I went to the market for but I can remember
clearly the moments of losing my loved ones. Sometimes in my nightmares I
relive the moments. There have been times when I watch a really scary movie or
read a book before bed hoping to dream about anything else, but it has always
been this way. Nightmares every night. Some are as simple as just having a bad
day but almost always there are the ones where I lose people. Watching the news
before bed just makes it worse. I have tried journaling my nightmares but it is
so hard to put them into words. It is
not for lack of a large vocabulary, it is just that the words do not do justice
to the feelings and even when I write the feelings they do not seem to go with
the actions, but in my head they did.
Some have suggested I have some traumatic head noise from the job. Yeah,
I would think so. I can’t put into words what it does to the soul to do an
autopsy on a child, or worse a baby. As
a mother it was just awful to have to literally cut up someone’s baby. Then also to see what people do to each
other. There is a sickness sweeping this nation, this world, where people are
hurting each other, hurting children, elderly, animals and even themselves for
no purpose and I do not understand. I know that if I had to fight someone for
my life or theirs, I could do it. I could do it for someone I love too, but it
is not something I would chose to do, the other person would have to leave me
no choice but to fight to survive. Now I have to rebuild my trust in people but
I don’t know how long or what that will take considering what I have seen and
experienced.
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