Circling Back

Grief is circular.  Years later, you are back to a spot you'd been before...and before...and before.

I spent the better part of last night grilling my EMT friend, Jen, about all the steps and protocol related to Cory's accident.  Poor Jen.  I felt like an ass for asking her the God awful questions and she felt like an ass for telling me the answers.  I felt even worse when I realized this was not the first time I'd imposed on our friendship to pick through her medical knowledge like some buzzard on the prowl.  Her answer?  "I'll tell you as many times as you need me to."

That's a friend, right there.

And in the course of this all too aggressive Q & A period- done through facebook IM, many parts beginning to feel like raised voices and other parts causing periods of uncontrollable sobbing- I learned three medical terms for heart rhythms, but still not the reason my girl had to die.  Poor Jen.  She doesn't have that answer.  Bless her heart for enduring my pressing demands for it.

All that information, all that jargon, all the protocol- I pinned all my hopes on it.  As if I really believe in my heart that if I understood what happened, specifically, and could line it up, the way I like to process things, I would be ok with the final outcome.  What a fool I am.

Electrical activity...severed spinal cord...fixed and dilated pupils...they're all the same question, that I apparently have refused to stop asking:  "Can this please not be true anymore?"

Still bargaining at this late stage of the grief game.  Damn, Nick.  Damn.

I did manage to gather one piece of information from Jen that I didn't have before.  Her friend, Mark, a firefighter, was the first one to get to Cory.  And he is a nice guy.  A father.  She told me it took him a long time and many conversations to convince her that nothing else could've been done for Cory.  I just wish he could convince me.