Only on the inside.

When I was a young teen, I watched my grandparents’ neighbor die of a heart attack in his boat. He leaned over - I thought to get a life jacket or something - and his boat just kept circling backwards. Not much to say. It took the ambulance over an hour to arrive. There was a very small pool of blood, maybe 2-3 inches in diameter, on the floor of the boat.

That’s it. Nothing exciting or traumatic.

I was in hospice with my father and I watched him die for a few days, or…was it a few months.

Yeah, all the time. Infants through adults. Never really gets easier, you just learn to compartmentalize and how to give words of comfort and let people grieve.

Get mental health treatment.

Yes, but not a person. I was 14, coming back from school, and I saw a kitten bleed to death. I kept walking on my way to home, but it saw us, and kept following and purring at us, limping in pain, maybe asking for water and aid, after it was probably hit by a car, or bitten and thrown around by dogs. It’s flesh wasn’t gouged or anything, there wasn’t anything gory about it, but it was bleeding profusely. I did nothing, because I wasn’t able to process what happened, and continued my way back home.

A person 10 feet behind me got hit and run. Didn’t see the diagnosis, but I don’t think the dude made it

I felt the very last heartbeat of my step-father while holding his arm, on his death bed. He died peacefully at 98 years of age.

Just pets.

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I was within 8 meters of someone dying twice, the second time I was less than 2 meters away.

The first was a truck driver with a load of cast iron pipes. Truck was on a slight angle, and when he undid the straps the load fell on him.

Second time was a load of stone going up a scaffold on a hoist, it hadn’t been secured properly and a guy cut through the exclusion zone and this 100kg stone window cill just…yeah. There wasn’t really a lot left of the top third of him.

I’ve had a lot of therapy about these and I still dream about the second one.

I’ve seen a bird get rolled over by a truck. Feathers flew in the air for a good 10 seconds. F in the chat for the bird.

I’m an orderly in an OR that does organ procurements from donors. The patients are already brain dead or otherwise intubated, but still technically alive. When the doctors open them up and get to where the organs are, there is a brief moment of silence and a prewritten letter in their honor is read aloud. After that they are taken off of life support and the organs are ready to be taken. The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It’s actually very fast from pink to gray.

It seems like I’ve been obsessed over death and dying for decades.

When I was thirteen, as a form of dealing with the concept of death, I imagined hearing the news of the deaths of each of my family members and a couple of the girls I liked from school. Finding out that a person is dead is a singular experience. A few years later, I viscerally understood what was said in Unforgiven, “[death] take[s] away all he’s got, all he’s ever gonna have.”

When I was sixteen, I did a cooperative education placement in a hospital. As fate would have it, I was placed in the histopathology department. I was surrounded by tissues removed from the dead, the dying, and those who had gotten a new lease on life. In the morgue, I helped discard any samples that were two or more years old. Removed silicone breast implants were frequent, as were containers labelled “uterine curettings.” In that same morgue, I sat in on two autopsies, including one where sections of the brain were needed.

Between 13 and 18, I began to be much more aware of conflict zones; injustice, and miscarriages of justice involving death; of the legacies left behind in their wake. I became aware of South African apartheid, war — later, genocide — in a disintegrating Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda. The collapse of social order in L.A. in '92. Hurricanes in the Caribbean, especially Andrew, which battered Jamaica. The Bay Area earthquake. The Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. This period also saw the formation of my opposition to capital punishment.

It wasn’t until 9/11 that I saw people die live on TV. I didn’t wake until 10 am that day, but by 1030, I saw both towers fall. By the end of that day, it was a buddy of mine who said, “Why don’t they stop showing this??” It hadn’t occurred to me that we were watching snuff film until then.

Then there was 17-18 March 2003. I sat and watched as Shock and Awe were released on Baghdad. One of the oldest cities in the world bombed for political expediency. More snuff film.

____ and ____ would later start to collect and disseminate the deadliest and the most violate material. I wouldn’t go looking for it, but it would find me. Cartel violence, industrial accidents, gun camera footage, people filming police shootings… there was so much death. Busta Rhymes said it best, “numerals of funerals every day.” Another thought that has not left me.

I didn’t know why I needed to know. Then, in time, I came to understand that I was bearing witness.

It was about 2004 when I started to develop an appreciation for the special violence of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict and the sheer destruction it inflicts. I read a lot about the Holocaust, Jewish diaspora, anti-Semitism, and the campaign to make genocide punishable. Then, I read about the roots of the Israeli state, its funding, protections, and the special relationship it enjoys with the warlike American state and its allies. Then, I read into America and how that state has secured its place in world history. I moved to South Korea and started to understand Korea, Japan, China, and the other nations of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Oceania, much more clearly.

What I found out is that, to some, achievable ends are sought by bloody means. This is a pattern across most of the world. In general, average everyday people are just trying to get by and do right by their families. In the places that we can not peacefully coexist, where expropriation and indignity are inflicted by those who wield the power they seek and are corrupted by it. Frank Herbert said, “Power is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Journalists, in my opinion, are those who pursue power in the practice of relinquishing it to the public. With this in mind, I understand the threat that Julian Assange was to the power establishment in the US. I saw the “Collateral Murder” release that landed him in the Ecuadorian embassy for the better part of a decade. The truly destructive part of this episode is the proliferation of instances in which military outfits across the world are engaged in similar activities. The Dutch Safety Board investigation and publications regarding the shooting down of flight MH17 are exceptional examples.

All of this is to say that we need to spend more time coming to terms with death and dying. We need to be more aware, not less, of the living conditions that cause people to die. War, famine, pestilence, climate upheaval, conflict zones, refugees from conflict and climate and corruption, drought, flooding, colonialism, austerity, and protectionism threaten almost all of the world’s population.

The few who are not threatened take refuge in their comfort and contrive to maintain the status quo. They change laws, lobby, employ, and help to elect and appoint those that serve the entreched interests. A future that looks like the present is a dead future, and we are witnessing the spread of atrophy and rigor mortis each day. That’s about as real as it gets.

I held my 14-year-old dog when he was put to sleep. I wanted him to feel loved until the moment he was gone. Putting my sadness aside so he could truly feel comforted was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.