I’m Sorry to Inform You

There are some tasks that repetition never makes easier. Arturo, a case in point.

Call him Arturo. He was thirty-six that warm, summer day. Like hundreds of fellow Minneapolitans, he decided to escape down-state heat by driving to Minnesota’s famed North Shore. Lake Superior provided coolness, an unfailing air-conditioner. Looming cliffs and green slopes dipped their feet in deep waters so blue that sky and lake seemed twins.

Arturo’s car was a soft-top roadster, a Buick Elektra model, robust and crimson. Arturo liked red. Color and brightness betokened his cheerful attitude toward life. He was single, a bachelor with a firm understanding of priorities. Freedom to roam. A good job that provided the means to enjoy what he cherished. He still lived with Mama, but not because he was a wimp. He had never seen a reason to move from home. Besides, Mama loved having someone to dote on. He considered it an obligation of sorts, what with Papa in his grave these ten years. Did it matter who benefited the more from such an arrangement?

Arturo’s hair was black, still free of any prophetic gray. True, it was thinner than he would have liked on top. His complexion was dark, a reflection of Mediterranean heritage. His skin did not burn, even that silver-dollar-sized bald spot.

Arturo rode with the big Buick’s top folded back. Those days when Minnesota allowed such a luxury were to be enjoyed; why else have a car that his cousin scornfully called a Mississippi River barge? He released the seatbelt, as confining as a corset, and drove casually, an arm across the back of the passenger seat. Arturo relaxed, in control.

Traffic was heavy after he left Duluth and headed northeast on two-lane U.S. Highway 61. It was August. Everyone and their cousin on the way north, know what I mean? He trod the brake pedal and frowned. Always some joker doing forty-five in a fifty-five zone, piling up a string of cars behind him like the tail of a fume-belching comet.

Finally the old guy in the lead turned off at some resort and cars speeded up. How many ahead? Five, maybe... yes, six. Behind him? More than he could see. Passing on a crowded, curving highway like this one... he shackled impatience, grinned and shrugged.

The procession came to one of those small towns that cling to the rocky slopes of the North Shore. Speed zone ahead, announced a DOT sign, as if anybody paid the slightest attention to that kind of—

Oh-oh!

The driver at the head of this train of cars, so interdependent, wanted to turn left. There was oncoming traffic. The first car stopped, its turn blinker hiccupping redly. Car number two braked. Number three came within six feet of the bumper of number two. By the time Arturo absorbed what was happening, he was nearly chewing the tail pipe of the car in front of him. He stole a glance in the rear-view mirror—

A heavy-duty pickup truck directly behind him had passed that critical point when stopping remained an option. Tires blackened pavement loudly. Still traveling at thirty-plus miles an hour, the truck slammed into the rear of Arturo’s roadster, crashing it against the car in front of him.

Arturo’s Buick ejected him like a stuntman fired from a circus cannon. He sailed twenty-seven feet before landing squarely on his head.

I arrived at the scene some thirty minutes later. The snarl of traffic stretched for nearly a mile, cars funneling past the site one at a time. I declared the obvious, that Arturo was dead. Don, the highway patrolman working the scene, had found a name and phone number in the man’s wallet. Don, his fellow officer, the just-arrived mortician—all eyes turned toward me. I was faced with the task of notifying survivors.

I drew a deep breath, found a telephone and dialed the number listed in Arturo’s papers. A woman answered.

First, identify the person on the other end of the line. “Are you Mrs.-----?” Then choose from a repertoire of openers.

(“I have bad news for you. Your son...”)

(“Are you sitting down? Your son...”)

(“I’m terribly sorry to have to report to you that your son...”)

I cannot remember which inane phrases I used to tell the lady that her only child had been killed, but I will never forget what happened once she comprehended the message. She screamed and dropped the telephone; I heard it bounce on the floor. From then on, for the next minutes, the next horrors of minutes, I listened to her wailing anguish from three hundred unbridgeable miles away. I hollered into the phone, pled with her to pick up the receiver, cursed my insensitivity, willed my words be returned to me. She did not come back on the line, and I eventually hung up.

Dear unknown lady, from these decades too late, I offer my humblest apologies for the way in which I informed you of your son’s death. In my dark hours, I return still in thought and wish I could have another chance. For whatever forlorn comfort it might give, I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. A cold voice on a telephone is no substitute for a human presence in the face of such grief.

The nature of a practice in an area where visitors comprise a large part of it meant that I faced similar circumstances again, over and over. From that day on, I called a policeman or (if known) a pastor and asked him to deliver the terrible message in person. For passing such a burden on to you who were the lawmen and religious people of your scattered communities, I apologize and hope you understand.

To practitioners of three professions regularly falls the task of informing someone that a loved one will never return home. A policeman, or in a time of war, a soldier at the door. By the mythology of our culture, we anoint a religious leader with some power to break such news and make it less shattering. Ever and always, there is the physician.

A doctor is by the nature of things the person who decides when life has departed. Death is seldom an event compressed into a moment of time. Organs of the body fail in cascading sequence when death stalks forward. Ordinary citizens know of “brain-dead” injury, informed by newspaper and television. One’s nervous system is the ultimately irreplaceable “part.” Hearts, kidneys, lungs, bone, even lowly skin can be “salvaged” for the benefit of another person. When can the physician certify death under these constraints? When declare the battle lost?

My experience is that those in society whose work places them at the interface between life and death cope with sudden disaster little better than anyone else. Macabre whimsy in the presence of death, gallows humor, is a defense. Calluses the psyche must form are so easily mistaken for callousness. The physicians I have known best, the lawmen, the pastors, dread bearing news of death, especially when it is unexpected. Look the bewildered new widow in the eye?

“So sorry,” is trite and hollow to the policeman’s own ear. Spew words like tainted confetti? A colleague tells of an occasion when he simply sat with survivors in a tiny office room for minutes stretching into half an hour. Silently. Without movement or touching. Yet, those with whom he “shared” felt his pain and accepted it as balm.

We notifiers each react according to our own inhibitions. My instincts are to touch quietly, hand to arm, even a hug. Trite as it is, “I’m sorry,” when it is sincere, carries more healing than a sermon-full of words.

There is, and can be, no easy way.