An AF member does what no one else did

[abaris]

She held it together until she got home.   It's a traumatic experience.

I guess it's for anyone. When I was a professional, we used to shut it out. Probably in the same way as soldiers, police officers or fire fighters. I never counted the bodies I found. But what stuck was the indignity of death. You can't help pissing and shitting yourself when your body shuts down. Also the banality of death stuck. Such as seeing their books in a neat row or their video collection, never to be picked up again.

But apart of that, few things made me think. Make no mistake, there was a lot of beer involved in the evenings. For everyone of us. We were made to witness the ass end of society, the part of life everyone shuts out of their perception. Nobody wants to think about falling seriously ill or dying. When we flashed our lights, people tend to look the other way.

And we didn't want to think about it either. Nobody wants to go down the path of mortality. That's where the beer and other stuff comes in. But what ultimately made me quit the job was my parents getting on in age. I couldn't cope with the possibility of it being me having to pick them up.