A shovel full of blood

By having Annebelle tell us in graphic detail about her job as cleaner at a suicide scene, Prof. Sexson was asking us to step into her shoes.The image of a scene where there was so much blood it could fill shovels was albeit gross. As I pictured Annabelle in a hazmat suite slopping up that much blood my heart went out to her. Not for the mere gross factor of performing such physically nasty work, but for the psychological fortitude it required from Annabelle. Annabelle herself must have stepped into the shoes of every member of that family. The little blond girl who will suffer the loss of her father until she dies. The fiance who will suffer the loss of a lover and the sufferings of her daughter until her death. The father who suffered so greatly that his suffering over shadowed the suffering he was to bring about on his young child and fiance, we presumed he loved deeply. The mind is hard pressed to continue to think of such suffering, to think of such senseless suffering., but it continues. Under little encouragement my thoughts go to how this grizzly scene will now be carried inside the minds of the crime scene investigators, the coroner, the cleanup crew until the end of their lives. Not only do I feel compassion for these strangers I've never met, I can feel my heart being squeezed in my chest. Just by allowing myself to step into the shoes of someone else I am able to experience a physical response to misery that played out in another time and place. Why did my mind not stop at the image of the wet floor deep in blood? It is a much nicer image than that of the prolonged suffering of everyone that single suicide has touched, and the added thought that thousands of suicides are carried out each year. Would I rather step into the shoes of the suffering or the shoes of the naive? Part of me feels as though I have heard enough of the sufferings of others that I would be content with wearing naive shoes the remaining days of my life. At the same time I know there's something bigger and unidentifiable inside me that would not feel content with not knowing the truth in this world.