The Day After: How I Dealt With Finding Death

One night a few weeks ago, I found a woman lying in a snowbank just outside my office.

I think I did all the right things—checking for a pulse, calling 911, giving her CPR—and, in the end, when the ambulance just sat there with her in it and didn’t rush off, I knew what I had suspected the moment I found her.

I’m a psychotherapist in western Massachusetts, and I work out of a small house converted to office space in a residential neighborhood. It was dark that night when I left work, windy and ice cold, and I saw her behind the house where we had both parked because the plows hadn’t cleared the snow-turned-slush-turned-ice in front of the house.

Her car door was open and she lay in the hardened snow as if she’d tipped backward, one leg bent at the knee. She’s slipped and knocked herself unconscious, I thought. I shook her leg, and as much as I didn’t want the thought, I already knew this was really bad.

Later that night, afterward, it was the details that I kept returning to. Even after giving my statement to the young cop in a small room with one-way mirrors on either side, after recounting the story at home over a late dinner, after lying in bed waiting for sleep as I walked myself through everything I’d done—or might have missed doing—the details barraged me with the surreal impossibility of it all.

Psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk noted in The Body Keeps the Score that with trauma, “The first order of business is to find ways to cope with feeling overwhelmed by the sensations and emotions associated with the [trauma].”

I know that as I’m telling and retelling myself what happened, my brain is only trying to order itself. I’m only trying to make sense of the whirling blur of feelings, for in the end, it’s those feelings that will construct the story I’ll remember not just about what happened, but who I was and what kind of world I live in.

That’s the thing with trauma, big or small: What matters is what we tell ourselves in the days after, and it’s our feelings—conscious or not—that often determine the story that becomes part of who we are.

It took time to sort out my feelings, but I realized I mostly felt helpless and powerless, forcing her lungs to breathe and her heart to beat. That’s not the narrative I wanted to take on: the futility of it all, my uselessness.

And yet, I was useless, as were the paramedics with all their tools and training. We couldn’t bring her back: our collective helplessness.

That can’t be the lesson I take from this.

**

The morning after, I gave myself extra time before returning to the office. As I made my tea, I surprised myself with this thought: There’s no way I’m going to park again in back of the house where I found her.

What was with that? Did I really think the scene would repeat itself?

I felt another narrative forming around a fear I hadn’t felt the previous night: The world is unsafe and people drop dead for no reason, which means I have to somehow protect myself and those I love.

Intense moments—and especially traumatic ones—burn themselves into our brains. The danger comes when we generalize the moment, when we begin to believe this is how everything now works: that I can’t help in moments when my help matters most, that I’ll find bodies every night when I leave work.

I know my brain is only trying to protect me, to be on the alert so I’m prepared when I find another body, but I don’t want this kind of protection.

I only want to put the experience to rest, not to forget it, but to see it for what it was: I found a woman in the snow but was too late to help. I want this to be my memory and not a new way I now have to live.

That morning, I sat with my tea cupped in my hands, the steam feathering my face. I had time yet before needing to leave. Time to think this through, and time to think it through again. The gentle back and forth between what I felt and what I knew, and somewhere in the middle of it, I hoped to find space to breathe easy again.