GoKawiilYou’ve made some bargains. We all have. Maybe you allow yourself a single Tommy’s burger every six months. Maybe you’ve given up meat altogether, or red meat anyway, most of the time. Maybe you’re serious about this and you’ve given up all refined grains and any processed anything; the extra buck a pound to buy organic seems a reasonable sacrifice. You’ve given up booze, cigarettes, pills, cocaine, sex with strangers. You tell yourself you don’t miss them. You wear sunscreen and eat flaxseeds. You go to the gym on breezy Sundays when you’d rather lie around. You go to yoga classes even though the chanting makes you want the world to end. You sold your motorcycle years ago. You cross at the light and look both ways.
No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don’t be frightened. She takes us all.
Even here in Los Angeles, in the glow of so much newness, she takes 60,000 of us each year.1 That’s 164 each day. Imagine them all lying side by side, napping forever without a snore. The sun goes down and rises again, and 164 more are sleeping beside them, resting cheeks on shoulders, ears on arms. One day you will join their still parade. Chances are good–about one in four in L.A. County–that death will grab you by the heart. Coronary disease is by far our leading cause of mortality, as it is in the rest of the country. L.A.’s specific inequities, though, travel as deeply through death as they do through life. In this and other ways, death maps life. If you’re an African American or a Latino male and you die before 75, you’re more likely to die of homicide than any other cause. The same goes if you’re of any race or either gender and you live in South L.A. If you’re white or live west of La Cienega and it’s not your ticker that gets you, it will most likely be an overdose, or a car crash, or lung cancer,2or your own hand–murder is not even in the running.
Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a “loved one.” You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do.3 Someone will find what’s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty’s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won’t care.
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Power Words
So here you are, dead and alone. Chances are you didn’t want this, but your wishes were ignored. Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn’t finished yet–the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning.
The path forks before it. Which way it goes will be determined by the cause of your demise. All the state wants is a death certificate: Think of it as a letter from your doctor excusing you from paying income tax forever. The county, though, wants to know why you died and if there might be a reason to push the cops and the courts and the jails into motion. The coroner holds the key to all that machinery. The key itself is what you once called you. If you have not been under the care of a physician for six months, if you die during surgery or as a result of injuries sustained in an accident or an assault (self-inflicted or otherwise), or if there’s any suspicion that your death might be something other than “natural,” your next stop will be the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner–which is, assistant chief coroner Ed Winter 4 tells me more than once, the busiest such department in the country.
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It investigates 18,000 deaths a year, dispatching 36 investigators 5 to the far edges of its jurisdiction–from Lancaster to Long Beach and West Covina to Catalina Island, from oil tankers and cruise ships anchored off the coast to jets on the runway at LAX. One of those investigators will come to you. He or she (let’s go with she, because more often these days the investigators are women) will search your pockets for ID. If you are at home, she will nose around for medical records. She will interview relatives, witnesses to your final moments, and the police at the scene. She will photograph and examine you. You’ve seen this part on TV. When she has finished, she and a driver will load you into the rear of a white county van and take you on one last drive down one last freeway, through one last Sig-Alert, off that final off-ramp onto Mission Road. At the corner of Marengo they will pull into a driveway at the side of an elegant old brick building. They will open the back of the van, roll you out, and take you inside, where you will wait quietly in the coroner’s fridge until one of 25 overburdened pathologists is ready to examine you.
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