When You Least Expect It

This is a story about something that happened to me a couple of years ago.

I had been working different jobs for about a year, only lasting between four and 20 weeks each time. At this point I was working for a carpenter, and the work itself wasn’t too bad actually. It was summer and the workshop was cool and rather calm if none of the huge buzz saws were running. Shifts were from 8 to 5 which was a lot better than what I had mostly done before (more about that probably in another installment). We were doing custom work for well-off people only. Like wall units and shit like that. Some people would look at this as “keeping things interesting” – for me that just meant it was annoying because you had to actually be awake and pay attention to what you were doing since it was never the same thing twice.

So one day we had finished a rather big order and it was time to install the shit at the customer’s home. Packed all the stuff in a truck at 6 AM and headed for some suburb where they lived. It was a hot day and it was hard work. By the time all the stuff was where we needed it to start the assembly it was 9 AM and I basically had had enough already. But of course that wasn’t exactly everyone’s top priority so I decided to get this done as fast as I could. We worked until about 6 PM without a break and we were still not finished. My boss decided it’s enough for the day and I couldn’t agree more.

Now things got... interesting.

I am so glad this long day is finally over. I am tired and I can’t wait to get home and have a few beers. I pick up our stuff that’s spread around the floor whilthe boss is kneeling in front of some sketches, lost in his thoughts. All of a sudden he heaves a loud sigh and lets himself fall back. It sounded angry and I braced myself for the worst.

Or so I thought.

He landed on a vacuum cleaner and switched it on in the process and now he’s lying flat on his back staring at the ceiling.

I just stand there... waiting. Ten seconds go by.

Nothing.

I am waiting for him to get up and throw a hissy fit like the lunatic he sometimes was. Another ten seconds go by. It’s silent. The vacuum cleaner is the only noise to be heard. I wonder what mistake he or I made during the day that got him so pissed off he had to lie down like this. Another ten seconds. Damn, what did I do wrong? I’m not keen on starting this fucking job from scratch all over again.

He’s been lying there for almost a minute now. Something is fishy about this situation. I step up and turn off that fucking vacuum cleaner. It’s silent now. Dead-silent.

I say his name. I poke him. I shout at him and shake him. No reaction whatsoever. I freak out.

I have no idea if anyone’s at home. The house is huge and I don’t know where the phone’s at, and even if I knew that, I don’t know the address. I run down a hallway randomly opening doors and yelling for the house owners. After what seems like an eternity someone shows up and I tell her to call the ambulance. I go back to my boss who’s already started turning blue. Foam is building up in his mouth, but I can hear him breathing... if you can call it that. From time to time he’s loudly panting for some air and it sounds alarming to say the least. I’m not familiar with these things but I believe he’s having some kind of epileptic seizure. Nothing too serious, I tell myself, trying to calm myself down.

I don’t know shit about first aid but I think turning him on his side and emptying his mouth which is full of foam and slobber would be a good idea. I always thought something like that would gross me out but I didn’t even notice it. The woman who made the emergency call comes in, turns white and runs out again.

Now I can smell the stench of urine, and probably other egesta, while it’s getting wet under my knees. What the fuck?! All I know is that I haven’t pissed my pants.
I have no idea what’s going on but since he’s making some noises and obviously emptying his bladder it should be alright. Whatever it is that’s happening, it’s not exactly glamorous. Where are the fucking paramedics?!

Well, they arrive and start to revive him or something. Soon he’s full of devices I’ve never seen and tubes are hanging out everywhere. They’re all hectically giving instructions to each other. One of them yells at me to get out of the way and to sit down somewhere while another one hands me an IV and tells me to hold it high. I try to tell them to make up their minds, it’s not my own piss on my pants and I don’t need to sit down.

This went on for about half an hour.

When they finally stopped and decided they couldn’t do anything for him they basically told me he’d already been dead when they arrived. This means he had just dropped dead before my very eyes or had died while I was holding him, waiting for the ambulance. I could have done without that information.

Now the real fun began. The paramedics called the cops and gave his belongings to me until they would arrive. As bad as it sounds, I was on rather hard times back then and when I saw he had about 150 bucks in his purse I was tempted to take it. I decided it would just be too embarrassing later on when I'm caught stealing from someone who had just passed away though.

On the other hand, the fact that he died meant I had just worked for two months in vain. It was a one-man-business and there wasn’t anybody who I could have approached to get paid. But that wasn’t my main concern right then. The fucking cops were on their way to interrogate me since I was the only one present when he died and the cause of death was unknown.

So they arrive and one guy tells me to get out and starts describing the scenery speaking in a small tape recorder. A woman leads me out to the patio and tells me to sit down. She also seems to be worried that I will pass out or something. She sends the owner of the house to get me something to drink. I have no idea why they’re doing this but I gladly accept when a rather expensive Cognac is offered to me. The police woman starts asking me about what happened while I guzzle down my drink and someone is already on the way for another. I tell them what I saw and after repeating it three or four times they believe me and tell me it’s just a routine interrogation and they don’t suspect me of having done anything.

No shit.

Are they telling me that killing your boss in someone else’s house in the middle of the day when that only means you will get no money for two months’ work is not a great idea?

The cops leave and the nice owner of the house offers to give me a ride home since I have no idea where I am, having spent the journey to here in the back of a truck with no windows. During the ride it turns out he’s not nice but rather wants me to finish the work in their house alone since they don’t know who else to approach about this now. I explain that I am basically an unskilled employee and even if I wanted to do it I wasn’t allowed to. He insisted on it until I just agreed so he would shut up. The work had been paid for by him in advance but I had not seen anything from it so he could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned.

When I got home and sat alone for a while it occurred to me that if this whole thing had happened five minutes later I would have been dead. On the autobahn on our way home in the back of the truck surrounded by sharp tools with a passed out driver. There’s no way I could have survived that. Finally some good news. What a nice fucking day.

Then my mind started to drift back in time. The guy who had just died had been the oldest friend of my father from when he first came to Germany. They graduated together and married both around the same time. They even had their first kids in the same year. The families got together once a week and so his son became my first friend and we remained friends until I was almost eleven. I remembered all these times and how close I had actually been to his father, too. I spent every other day at their house and while I didn’t really like him as a kid and I had only seen him as the cranky demanding boss in the last months I suddenly felt very sad about it all. I thought about how his son, who I hadn’t seen in over ten years, would react… And also about his wife, sitting at home waiting for him to return right now, only to have a police psychologist come to her house with some really bad news. He also had a daughter.

I had been so cool while it happened and while I was surrounded by people, but now I was almost fighting back tears - which hadn’t happened in a long time. This was fucked up, and I spent the rest of the day drinking heavily until that annoying ability to think about it wore off. I even called my father and told him about it, but it was such an awkward situation I had to hang up as soon as I could convince him that I wasn’t bullshitting him.

Reviewing that day in my mind now made me remember another event from my childhood. I was at the beach in Morocco. I must have been about five years old. There was a small cluster of people waiting at the waterside pointing at the ocean. I walked up to them and came just in time to see someone pulling an unconscious man out of the water. After some unsuccessful tries to reanimate him a doctor finally showed up and declared him dead. There was no lifeguard there and until an ambulance could have arrived it would have already been much too late.

That was my first encounter with death and probably the day I first realized what death really meant. After that I didn’t like swimming there as much as I had before. My parents had always warned me about the dangers of drowning but I had no idea what they were talking about until I witnessed that incident.

Maybe all this subconsciously made me lead my life a little differently. From an early age I had a feeling that everything could be over any minute. I never knowingly thought along the lines of catch phrases like “live life to the fullest” or shit like that, but maybe there’s a reason why I never really made any long-term plans for the future, especially when it would interfere with my everyday life or at least the parts of it that I enjoy.

But then again, maybe I just used it as an excuse not to worry too much about what’s to come.

Would that be so bad, though? If you aspire to really “live in the now”, what sense would it make to ruin your enjoyment by giving yourself a hard time about it?


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