Douglas Blaine

I am quoting my own comment here at the bottom, but I think that if you are coming to this site and not linking over to Coroner Stories from time to time, you should.

A. Douglas writes:

Blood and guts aside, death investigation was—and continues to be—the antithesis of what I consider to be a “normal� job. The kind of job where a person produces something tangible or at the very least goes to work with established tasks to accomplish. Instead I feel like an auto mechanic that was hired to respond to every car breakdown in the city wherever and whenever one occurs. Like a conventional auto mechanic, I can make diagnostic impressions, but unlike an auto mechanic, every vehicle I look at is beyond repair.

My comment back, based on an overall impression of his blog:

I think this post inadvertantly ties in with alot of the comments I have been reading on your blog, those in the “Wow, I couldn’t do your job.� vein.

You clearly have a job and a role in society that needs to be performed–we can’t just leave the dead lying around. If your readers’ comments are a reflection of the populace at large it’s clear that most have no desire for such work. So, on a purely utilitarian level you do have a product at the end of the day, you have accomplished something. It may only seem that it was to keep things tidy around the city, once again allowing the rest of us to ignore death and tragedy for another day. But you have to know its more than that too.

If it was only about the bodies, you wouldn’t take the time to humanize your stories–which is what I find in your posts and what I have found others find as well. What you have been presenting us with these past months is more than a clinical run down of the facts. You have shown us humor, comedy, suffering, and sympathy.

That kind of breadth of experience is exactly what I find missing in my mundane 9-5 job. I pump souless papers across my desk, it’s not intriguing, it’s not worthwhile, and it’s not terribly satisfying for my heart.

I won’t argue that you haven’t become desensitized to both the grim and the sad aspects of the job, but I will assert that you have become desesitized at a depth that most of us won’t reach in our work.

Thanks for illuminating my understanding each week.

Enjoy!