After I savor my morning cup of coffee, I walk the two-mile loop in Buffalo Park as my way of coming into the day. Morning Edition pipes into my skull, the mountains embolden and soothe with their nearness, and well-being coats my central nervous system.
About a month ago, I was midway through my second lap in the park when I saw a man and woman stopped ahead of me on the trail. The woman held a cell phone and craned her neck right and left, as if looking for something. Both appeared confused. A few feet away lay a man on his side, crumpled into the grass at the trail’s edge. He wore exercise clothes. An upended straw hat was beside him.
“Is your friend all right?” I asked as I approached them. They told me they did not know the man. Seconds ago, they had come upon him as he was. They were from out of town, here on vacation, unsure what to do. They had called 911; a dispatcher said she was sending an ambulance and a police car and would remain on the phone with the couple until help arrived.
“Is he conscious?” I asked. They said they didn’t think so; they hadn’t touched him.
I knelt over the fallen man and bent down to listen for his breath. He gurgled faintly; I smelled no alcohol and nothing about his body looked amiss. He appeared to be unconscious. A heart attack? While the couple spoke to the dispatcher on speakerphone, I spoke to the man.
I told him I was going to turn him onto his back. I removed his sunglasses and the ear buds tethered to an iPod in his pocket. No ID. He had a wide face and a receding hairline. Maybe he was in his 70s? I crouched near his head and told him people were coming for him, people who would take care of him. I told him to hang on. I stroked his face and smoothed his hair. I could not find a pulse.
Time telescoped. My world specified. There was only one thing—this man, this moment, this experience. Can he hear me? Is he dead? How do I help him?
The gurgling stopped, and I could not hear him breathing. The dispatcher asked us to administer CPR. The man on the trail intertwined his hands and knelt over the fallen man, pumping his chest like I had learned in first aid class, like we’ve all seen in TV shows and movies.
“Now pinch his nose and breathe two deep breaths into his lungs,” the dispatcher instructed. I bent over the fallen man, put my lips on his and sent my breath into him as deeply as I could. I imagined my breath mingling with his, swirling into the soft caverns of his lungs, urging them to accordion again, pushing oxygen and life back into him. Does he have children? Can he hear me? Is someone somewhere waiting for him?
I bent over him once more, put my mouth on his and breathed. His body jerked, but still no breath. Another round of compressions. We both counted aloud, our voices brittle and determined. The woman stayed on the trail, narrating to the dispatcher.
We continued CPR until the police and ambulance came. A swarm of EMTs took over and worked to resuscitate the man. A police officer took our names and phone numbers and wrote a few declarative sentences into a small notebook describing what had happened.
After he had taken our information, the officer told us that we were free to go. We weren’t free to go; we were compelled to stay. We were three strangers who had wandered into the final moments of this man’s life. We had touched him, had tried for him, had hoped for him. Instead, we stepped closer to one another, held hands and watched until they loaded the man into the ambulance and drove away. Despite the efforts, there was no pulse.
The three of us stood in silence for a short while after the ambulance and police left. Then we hugged, said goodbye and parted. As I walked home, I felt drifty and contemplative. I had a jet stream of feelings, but I couldn’t give them names. When I was bent over him, breathing into him, the world was no larger than my face and his and the little patch of ground he lay on. And now, in the aftermath, the world widened again.
I thought of the act of dying—so usual, so ordinary, so frequent. And then I thought of what I had just experienced—so unusual, so rare in my life. I had never before stumbled onto the final moments of someone’s timeline. I had never put my mouth on someone else’s mouth hoping to breathe life into them—one frail, flawed human being to another, coaxing forth the life force, bearing witness as it leaks away.
Could he hear me? Was he loved? What had I been invited to see about who I am? And who might the strangers be who bend over me one day and ferry me from this realm into the next?
