Haunted Holidays

One year during the holidays we had two deaths while I worked at Frick Hospital. They seemed to point to suicides. One was on Christmas Eve and the other on New Year’s Eve. Both have haunted me over the years and I was “fortunate” enough to have worked both evenings.

It was Christmas Eve. I was working in the emergency department, when we received a call from an inbound ambulance. It was trauma victim from a motor vehicle accident. We only knew that it was a head on collision between a car and a large truck. We got the rest of the story when the ambulance crew arrived. This middle aged male had been traveling the wrong way down a four lane, divided highway. There was little that we could do. He had massive trauma to his head, legs, and chest.

When we identified the driver, we found that he was the husband of one of our medical/ surgical nurses. She was one with whom I had worked the nightshift several years earlier. The couple was going through a divorce. They had two sons. One was eleven and the other was thirteen. Their grief affected the whole hospital.

Actually it affected the whole town. It was as though someone had dimmed or even extinguished the Christmas spirit. Shortly after the funeral, the nurse quit her job at our hospital, sold her home, and moved away.

The second suicide occurred on New Year’s Eve. Again I was on duty. The ambulance crew called in an abbreviated report. They’d found an unresponsive young man in his garage with the car’s engine running. He’d been found slumped over the steering wheel. Not knowing how long he had been there, the ambulance crew attempted to revive him and brought him to the hospital.

He was a well known person in the community and the ambulance crew did all they could to resuscitate hem. We continued for a short while after his arrival, but to no avail. It was rumored that he was heavily in debt. He left behind a lovely young wife to deal with the chaos he left behind. They had a new house and a new baby, but with all she had, she’d lost so much.

The tragedy of these deaths extinguished the Christmas lights and silenced the New Year’s bells for me that year. When I look back, I remember nothing more about that holiday season than those two deaths and the grief and sympathy for the two families.