Author's note: I sketched the following article the third week of September, 2008, making final edits on Saturday, September 27th in preparation for submission to my editor. I found my mom dead in her home the next day. She wasn't the model of perfect health, but at 70 years of age, she was still too young to go.
Unwittingly drawn to write this piece a couple of days before my mother's death, it dawns on me that life's frailty is surpassed only by its irony.
I fight asthma and an unhealthy kinship with premium ice cream. Militant avoidance is the lone tactic that works for me in an effort to avoid the wrong kind of weight gain. Sadly, I don't have the all-things-in-moderation gene my wife is blessed with.
Thus, I'm a fitness buff. A varied routine prevents training adaptation and keeps my mind occupied. Crossfit, the holy grail of functional fitness for law enforcement, kickboxing, hiking and jogging play roles. Jogging? Well, I'm least suited for distance work, but I tend to get a lot done "upstairs" when on a long run.
(finger tap to forehead)
There's a 135-acre lake a short distance from our house. Clean air, thick trees and foliage, and a paved five-mile jogging trail encircle it. On a sun-soaked late September afternoon, I clicked on my iPod Shuffle loaded with socially retarded music and headed to the trail. Once in cadence, my mind drifted from active thoughts of running and into an odd sort of semi-consciousness; monotonous yet serene, this is a place I ponder life's issues.
The geographical area of responsibility I'm assigned, a narrow corridor in north-central Omaha, is cast in a dark pall. It's not unlike other lower middle class neighborhoods though. There exists a few inviting areas and prospering small businesses, but these pockets of sanity are surrounded by chaff. Most of the original homeowners took flight to the suburbs years ago. The demographic is predominately African-American, but there are whites and Latinos as well.
The grinder of the previous week the crew and I slogged through invaded my thoughts. A pair of gangland shootings in three days. Two fatalities, the second one going down in front of the decedent's toddler who may only escape the demons of seeing his dad lit up by virtue of being three years old–hopefully too early in his development to permanently damage him. Both killings occurred in broad daylight, the most recent mayhem a month removed from the shooting of a co-worker in the same neighborhood.
The bitch-goddess Sleep had been elusive the night prior, but I felt strangely energized on my run. Emerging from a canopy of shade, I came into a stretch of path littered with grasshoppers warming themselves in the bright rays. They leaped from certain death milliseconds before my Nike-clad feet descended on them, crashing back to earth in all manner of orientation: head first, on their backs, sometimes on their feet. These jarring falls from a great relative height looked to me like unmanned aircraft disasters in miniature, but the grasshoppers' exoskeletons protected them from the hard landing.
Mentally straying, I began to puzzle over the oddity life as a police officer can be to people outside the circle. I've long held the notion once you've done, oh, maybe a couple years as a cop, you can't cleanly return to that rosier, more innocent mindset which was your civilian life before. Once "cured" on the outside–perhaps the mind's innate self defense mechanism?–the general sense of cynicism and pessimism toward humanity can never be fully vanquished.
Morphing into something not unlike those locusts I encountered on a hot Indian summer afternoon, police officers' exteriors become toughened and resilient. Cops are able to tumble and land on their heads, then get back up with a spirited readiness to do it all over again. Call after call. Tour after tour. Year after year.
An early mentor, Lt. Marty Adams (OPD ret.), ruminated over a loss of fraternity since leaving the job in a recent phone conversation, but he accepted the reality of police work being a younger man's game. There were benefits of being retired from the department too, Marty said. Getting arm's-length from the depravity and decay associated with patrolling the mean streets in America refreshed him to a degree. Still, the exoskeleton of the younger street cop which shielded him from years back remains. Softened? Probably to a degree, but never gone for good he figures.
My message to you men and women in the trenches is straightforward: reality dictates you're the product of a potentially lethal brew of long hours and poor sleep, arduous working conditions, sometimes draconian discharge and discipline policies, and second-guessing by some of the least qualified to render judgment on your decision making (read: some of the brass, most of the media, and nearly all "community activists" and politicians).
Does any of this mean you're destined to be an automaton with the thousand-yard stare all your life? Is the exoskeleton's hardening of your persona a mandate on divorce, substance abuse or addiction, or a date with death via your own hand? Surely not, yet those are pitfalls police officers can find themselves falling into. Thus, acknowledgment of the exoskeleton's existence is, in itself, a safeguard. Or so I believe.
Nonetheless, I sometimes resent my detachment. I don't enjoy the fact I can't manage tears at funerals anymore. I dislike my estrangement from empathy in the face of suffering. I'm not a "tough guy" because life's travails don't appear to penetrate my exoskeleton; surely this is a trait of weakness rather than brawn.