It had been a while since I'd been in the company of dead people. Although two of my grandparents died over the last 18 months, I didn't see their bodies. When I accompanied my mom to the funeral home to make arrangements for her mother's cremation, I experienced a moment's wretched need for that last little act of closure. It was, after all, my final opportunity to see her corporeal form before it was reduced to ash. I let it pass. Grandma had said that she didn't want a regular funeral with a viewing. But it wasn't really out of respect for her wishes that I stayed silent and walked out of the funeral home without seeing her. Mom hadn't made any arrangements for viewing the body, and they probably had my grandmother on a metal table back there, and it would have been a big production number for them to prepare her for viewing. There seemed little point to it. I've known times when I really, absolutely had to see a body to come to terms with a death. There was a small child killed in a car accident when I worked on the ambulance in Ohio. I had to see that body afterwards, just for a few moments, for reasons I can't fully explain. This wasn't like that. I could let this one go.

So it's been years, really, since I was in the company of the dead. When we were dispatched to a possible DOA last night, I remembered how much I dislike dead people. I can't do anything for them. I stand around, in the midst of their former lives, waiting for the police to come and take over the situation. With time to waste, I take in the pictures on the wall, the magazines beside the sofa, the stuff stacked on the kitchen table. Someone related to the person calls family members on the phone and tells them to come. He picks up two framed photographs from the coffee table and shows them to me. "These are my kids," he says. I nod, a ghost on the edge of his vision. I doubt he will remember anything about me later.

I could describe a dead person, but there is plenty of time for that, because there will be more of them. Suffice it to say that they are not like you and me.

There is a security guard from the apartment building who cannot stop talking. Maybe he's trying to cover up his nervousness about death; maybe he's just like that. He starts telling the relative that this is the second DOA he's seen in this building. He says the other one was sitting in his chair and that it was very creepy. "It was like... hello?!" he says, miming waving his hands in front of someone's eyes. I can't believe he's saying this to a relative who just found a member of his family curled up dead on the floor. I wonder if I'm the only one here who wants to smack him.

The relative doesn't say much. He's somewhere we rarely go. The cop comes, which is routine in a case of death outside of a hospital. My crew leaves. One of my colleagues points out a beautiful artwork hanging near the door as we go out. A glimpse -- and it's gone. We take the ambulance to a brightly lit gas station to refuel, and we start joking about the "Free refueling mitten" that's advertised on the gas pump. We laugh and laugh, because laughter is one of the two reasonable options available to us.