Dead

My children saw their first dead person today.
As we were coming out of school an Air Ambulance was circling lower and lower overhead, looking for somewhere to land. By the time we got out of the school gates it looked as though it was coming down just up the road so we went up to see it land, but it dramatically veered away at the last minute. By that time though we could see the blue lights from an ordinary ambulance and a police car so we carried on walking, actually the kids I was with were running ahead, very excited.
When I caught up with them at the police line we could all see what had happened. A man was lying on the road with no shoes on, a paramedic was trying to resuscitate him, his motorcycle helmet was lying beside him. A little way down the road there was a load of debris and a blue car with a big dent in its wing.
After a couple on minutes the air ambulance people walked up from where they had landed but it soon became obvious that they weren’t in a hurry any more. Someone got out a defibrillator and then put it away again. People started to drift away.
The kids I was with weren’t as freaked out as I thought they would be. One of them said that she felt sorry for the man, even though she didn’t know him, then she said the idea of him lying there dead made her feel a bit sick. Another said she thought she knew who owned the car that the bike had ended up underneath. We all talked about how careful you should be, even on quiet roads like that one. My oldest daughter didn’t think it was ironic that she was carrying a death mask that she made this week in her Tutankhamun project. As we walked home they soon started to talk about other things and hardly noticed the air ambulance as it flew off again on its way to the next pitiful engagement.