by Studs Terkel
I actually believe in capital punishment. It’s rare for a doctor to say that, because doctors are trained in the preservation of human life. And it’s probably even rarer for a professed Catholic doctor to say that. But I believe that there are some people who should be killed. There are justifications for taking human life—predominantly self-protection. If somebody is going to kill you and the only way you can save yourself is by killing them, then you are justified to kill them. That can be extrapolated into a just war, if there ever is such a thing. Now, let’s go to the individual. I don’t think we should execute people as a deterrent, although it is the ultimate deterrent for the person you’ve executed. I think there are some people in this world who are evil: they murder other people. So I would need to have a person who has committed heinous crimes, and I would include in those heinous crimes, rapes.
I also am very concerned about people who kill police officers, or even politicians, because they’re protecting us. I would also need to know that there is no way to rehabilitate him. So that might mean that he has committed the crime many times. I would need to know that he continues to be a risk. People say, “Well, why don’t you lock them up for the rest of their lives?” I’ve seen these people. They will try to kill other inmates. They will try to kill their custodians. They will try to kill the guards. They are intrinsically evil. They cannot be rehabilitated, and they continue to pose a risk to their captors. They deserve to die because they are a threat to us, not because we’re trying to frighten other people from committing the crime. They would have to be guilty much more than beyond a reasonable doubt. They exist—I’ve seen them. There are people like that in the world.
When I’m dead, there will be this thing that is left like the body of my grandfather. That I don’t care what you do with it. It’s like when I go to the barber, he cuts my hair. Do I worry about the hair? I don’t give a damn what he does with it. You want to burn me? I don’t care. Actually, whoever is left who’s going to be responsible for my dead body, they need a ritual to bury me. So, sure, I’m sure there’ll be a little ceremony and they’ll be singing songs and ringing bells and lighting candles and smoking incense. I don’t care what they do. Because that thing in that coffin, that is not me. Now that I’m fifty-five, I actually think about dying. I didn’t think about it when I was twenty, or thirty, or forty. But I’ll soon be sixty. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff I intend to do yet. I’ve got big plans. My mother, she’s alive and she’s ninety years old; my father lived until he was eighty-six. I hope that I’ll live a long time. But I can grapple with it now: I can see myself dying. I think the process would be messy, the actual dying, death. But I don’t think I would be particularly bothered by the fact that death is inevitable. I’m not embracing death, but I’m not afraid of it. There are also the things you’ve done during the time you’ve spent on this earth that are going to remain behind, in some way, shape, or form, forever. If I’m dead and people come to my graveside and look at my tombstone, do you know what they’re going to say? They’re going to say, “Who was he?” You want to know who I am? If I wanted to have anything written on my tombstone, I would have, “Ask my children or ask my students.” I actually never thought of it quite that way. That wouldn’t be a bad epitaph.
Marc and Noreen Levison
MARC: I’m a paramedic with the fire department for twenty-five years. I grew up in Chicago. Right now I’m a field supervisor.
NOREEN: I’ve been a nurse for twenty years. I moved to Chicago in 1979. I met Marc when I was working in the emergency room at Rush–St. Luke’s–Presbyterian in 1981. He was a paramedic bringing the patients in.
MARC: The ER is where the most critical patients are brought in. That’s the first entrance to most hospitals. Right now, it’s the primary health care for most urban centers. The emergency room is a doctor’s office. On top of that, you have paramedics bringing in the critically injured, being resuscitated, and some that aren’t so critically ill. In Chicago, the fire department handles the living and the police handle the dead.
NOREEN: Being a nurse in the emergency room encompasses really everything from babies being born in the backs of cars to people taking their last breath of life. Usually people are in a stressful state, they’re in emotional turmoil. We’ve seen a lot of people die.
MARC: The stress of the job caused us to have something in common. Noreen and I clicked. We understood each other’s workday. I’m on a twenty-four-hour shift, and Noreen would do eight to ten hours at the emergency room. I spent thirteen and a half to fourteen years on the primary responding ambulance in the city. We get to the home before anybody, before the police, when the 911 call comes in. I’ve encountered death in the home and in the back of the ambulance. It was an honor to have the responsibility to go into the house first when they call—either the niece or the relative or the superintendent of the apartment building—and say, “Well, we haven’t heard from Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so in a couple of days . . .” We break into the house and there they are, they’re passed away.
The nice ones, to me, were the ones where it was an older person in their eighth or ninth decade of life. You walk into this house and they’re either on the floor or in their bedroom. They’ve been gone for maybe twenty-four hours. And it looks peaceful. There’s all this stuff in the house. The pictures from the twenties and their wedding pictures of their wife that passed away, or their husband—and the kids. And the little certificates on the wall. That guy’s laying on that bed almost like telling you, “Hey, screw you. I’m living here, this is my life, and this is where I died”—instead of just a body on the bed that’s got rigor mortis. This wasn’t a violent crime, this was a natural progression.
When I was twenty years old I got on the fire department and we would get two or three of these a week sometimes. You’d just see the beauty of a person’s life and it struck me that this is where they loved, either the Ukrainian Village or the West Side, and it didn’t matter what color they were, what religion, or anything else—death is just about the same for everybody. When they died in a peaceful sense I always took in the room. You know, you don’t disturb anything. You just take in the room and the stuff you can see, and it’s just a beautiful thing to know that this person, the body was a human being and had a whole history. It might have been so insignificant to the rest of the world. But to this person it was a significant life. Everybody’s got a significant life. And there they are, they’re dead.
The violent deaths are a lot different. The violent deaths are the gruesome, the grim, the suicides. Most of the suicides, the gun still stays in their hand. They don’t drop the gun. Oh my God, it’s a nightmare . . .
Or the kid that’s in the ambulance, the gangbanger that was a tough guy on the street two minutes before he took two nine-millimeters to the belly, and he’s got maybe an hour to make it to County Trauma Center. And here’s a little boy: you have to decipher, is he fourteen, or is he over fifteen years old and going to an adult trauma center. And the trauma centers weren’t put into effect until about 1987. We used to just take them anywhere. Here’s this kid that was the toughest kid on the street and now he’s looking at ya, and he’s got that look in his eye like, “I’m a baby and I’m scared to death.” You start up the IVs, you’ve done what you can do . . . They’re still awake, you’re not doing CPR, they still have vital signs, but they’re critical. You just might be the last person they see before they go into unconsciousness. Or when they hit the emergency room, that’s when the physicians and the nurses have to really start going and maybe crack the person’s chest right on the table. So you’re the last person that he’s going to remember talking to if he survives this incident. You gotta be careful what you say, you don’t want to degrade this person—you don’t want to pass judgment here. You hold their hand. “There, there,” is all you can say. As he sweats and the blood pressure’s dropping, the pulse is going up, and his respiratory rate is getting higher. You just hold his hand and say, “There, there . . .”
And he looks at you and you look at him. There’s an exchange between eyes. He knows he’s in trouble and you know he’s in trouble, and you don’t want to tell him, “You’re gonna die.” You say, “I’m right here with you. We’re going to get you there as quick as we can. And when you get there, they’re going to be doing a lot of things to you, so you just hang in there.” There’s no deathbed confessions from the gangbangers on the street. They don’t say, “Gee, I’m sorry I did anything.” They’re just tough little kids that are trying to survive.
NOREEN: I’m the nurse there. I don’t work in a trauma center, but we’ve had a lot of people come in where they’re about to arrest. When I was a new nurse, you would have somebody come in and they would look you in the eye and say, “I’m gonna die.” And I would grab their hand or I would try to comfort them. “We’re going to do everything we can for you.” But as I became a more experienced nurse, I realized that death is a part of life, and when they would look at me and say, “I’m going to die,” I would say, “Well, you may die. But what can I do now for you that’s going to help? Can I bring your family in? Do you need to call someone? Do you want me to stay here with you?” I changed my whole outlook on how I work with people when they’re dying, or when they feel like they know they’re going to die.
When a person looks at you and says, “I’m going to die,” they usually do die. That’s what my experience has been. Somehow they know that their life is going to pass. What I found is going to help them the most is to be in there with them. From a medical perspective, we’ve always been taught to save everybody—get in there, resuscitate everyone. It’s not always going to save them. Sometimes you’re the last person they’re talking to. What I’ve learned is: get that family member, get that husband, get the wife, get the daughter, get the grandson, whoever that significant person who’s waiting in that waiting room so anxiously, get them in there. So their last few breaths or conversation can be with that family member—not with someone who doesn’t really know them.
When someone comes in in an arrest, and the paramedics are pumping on their chest . . . Their heart has stopped. There’s not too much we can do. You try not to look too deeply at that person’s face because you know every person that passes by you affects you in some way. The people that stay with me the longest are the ones who die. Most of the people that come in in cardiac arrest die. What people see on TV is not what really happens. When they’re laying there, after we’re all done resuscitating, the nurses are the ones with the body, and they’re the ones to bring the family in. You look at the person and you say, “I wonder . . . what about this person?” Like Marc has the experience of being in their home and seeing the person. We don’t have that until the family starts to come in. And even though they’re grieving and it’s terrible for the loss, you see that this person had significance in their family and in the larger world. The hard ones are the people where there’s no identification. The junkie that comes in off the street and dies that nobody knows who they are. I think: Oh, that’s such a waste of life. It’s the people that don’t have anybody. Those are the ones that have really struck me.
MARC: We’re at such a high level. That’s the thing that scares me about being a human. We’re so highly developed, our emotions. You can’t let death go without thinking about it. You have to intellectualize something like what happened here and who was this person. You don’t have a heart unless you think about who was this guy, or who was this woman? But you can’t dwell on it because the next time you go out the door, it’s going to be another call. That’s the best part about it. Emergency rooms are busy. Noreen has to clean the patient up and make sure that it’s presentable for the family. But in the next two minutes, there might be another coming in for her.
What happens on our job and what happens in your personal life is completely different. My father died of lung cancer. Now I had cleaned the slate with my dad and had a great relationship with him. The day he was diagnosed, I got the call from my mom that they found he had cancer of the brain and lung. That’s a death sentence—I knew that intellectually. I wasn’t overwhelmed with this right away. He only survived two months after the diagnosis, which saved him a lot of pain and anxiety. He went on to wherever you go, peacefully in the night without too much suffering. My dad got out lucky. About forty-eight hours before he died we were at the hospital, Noreen and I, and something happened where emotionally I knew this was it: my dad was going to be dead in a day or two, and I’ll never see him again. It just ate me up inside and I broke down and cried and cried for about a half hour. It was a terror inside of me. It dawned on me that this is it, and the daddy I had when I was a little boy, the smells, the feel of his clothes—the smell of the T-shirt he wore, even with the nicotine on it—that’s what I identified with him. All the memories. It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I was able to hold his hand and say good-bye. But that terror that overwhelmed me was like nothing I ever felt before. It’s so permanent. There’s nothing the doctors can do, nothing anybody can do. He’s going to die and I’ll never see him again. I won’t be able to call him on the phone, I won’t be able to drive over to the house. Now, in my subconscious, he’s with me more than ever because I think of him almost on a day-to-day basis. When he was alive I didn’t think of him that much. That’s the difference between the professional and the personal.
NOREEN: In our ER, someone dies and we also prepare the body. We take out the tubes and all the other things that we’ve done to the people, so the family can come in.
MARC: They don’t want to see their loved ones with all the medical equipment still in there. That’s a job that I would not want that Noreen has.
NOREEN: When the family arrives, the doctor will go in and tell them. Sometimes the nurse will come along, especially if it’s a younger doctor that’s inexperienced. A lot of times we have the chaplain there. When I was a brand-new nurse, I wasn’t prepared for the response of the families. I had no idea that people would wail . . .
MARC: The death howl is indescribable. The mother that was just told that her kid is dead. It echoes through the halls of the hospital.
NOREEN: Inconsolable . . . The howling, the screaming, the falling on the floor, the almost seizure-like activity. That I had never experienced. We had a family of Gypsy background, and they laid their bodies on top of their mother. There’s no consoling them. They were laying on the ground and shaking. A lot of times I find in the African-American community their reverend comes in. They always say, “I’m going to wait for the reverend to come.” He groups the family together and they have a prayer around the body. That seems to really help in those situations.
MARC: I’ve had that happen. In the African-American community on the West Side they made a prayer circle around the ambulance as we’re doing CPR in the back. I looked out, all of a sudden they’re circling the ambulance, holding hands and praying. The neighbors heard about it, they came out of the church. I was struck by it. I almost didn’t want to leave.
NOREEN: We see a lot of prayer. What can you say to people, other than you’re sorry for their loss, you tried. There isn’t much else for the medical person to say. But the prayer takes them away from the immediacy of death to a different place.
MARC: Different types of death cause different types of reaction. Somebody shoots somebody, half of the family wants to go get the guy who shot him, they want revenge . . . Somebody who’s been run over by a car—they want that driver, they want justice. There’s a huge amount of anger. Justice and anger. And they want to know what happened in that trauma. “Couldn’t you save them?” I’ve had that a couple of times, couldn’t I do any more? I’ve never felt for one second that my partner and I ever did anything less than we could have. We always gave a hundred percent. That’s one of the reasons that I’m able to close my eyes at night and love my job, because there’s no slacking in the back of that ambulance.
Being on the front lines of death makes me more grateful that I’m healthy
today. And when we have our arguments, as all married couples do, or I yell at my kids, it makes it a little easier to say I’m sorry quicker, to appreciate, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”—because I’ve seen some big fucking stuff happen.
Lloyd (Pete) Haywood
We’re at Stateway Gardens, a public housing project on Chicago’s South Side. In its public squalor, it is incongruously surrounded by private affluence. On one side is the Illinois Institute of Technology, celebrating Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. On another side is Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox. Overlooking the whole scene is the new site of the Chicago Police Headquarters.
Jamie Kalven, a freewheeling journalist, is my docent as we enter the shadowy, dimly lit precincts of the project. He is also the ex officio ombudsman for the residents—patently, the only Caucasian the residents trust. In the cold, dark corridors, we encounter figures, “hanging out”; I cannot make out their faces. They recognize my companion, of course, and offer casual salutations.
We pause near the elevator. It is astonishingly small for a building so densely populated. We greet Pete, who has been expecting us. He indicates the lift: “Here is where I been shot and left for dead.”
We rattle our way upward, toward one of the higher stories. His tiny apartment, in dramatic contrast to all else around and about, is airy, full of light, and painstakingly neat. There are puffy white pillows on the somewhat tattered couch. On the end table is a well-thumbed paperback: John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. On the wall is a picture that immediately catches your eye. It appears to be a cemetery or some sort of memorial park.
