Four weeks ago today, well tonight to be really specific, I happened to drive by a situation on the street here in Charlottetown. I immediately realized that it wasn’t normal but I didn’t immediately understand what it was. Unable to find a safe place to pull over I raced around the block back to where I started and hopped out of my car. There was a person lying on the ground. There were two men standing over the person. One had a cell phone out. The men standing up were nice men, not beat-up-people ruffians. Business types. The person on the ground was what I’d stereotypically call a street person. The business types said they just found him here and didn’t know how he got there or what had happened. The street person wasn’t moving. The business types also said they couldn’t find a pulse so they called an ambulance. Shit.

I asked the two gentlemen if they knew CPR. They didn’t. Having taken first aid and CPR (although a little while ago) all authority and responsibility immediately fell upon my shoulders. I got down on my knees on the freezing cold concrete and checked to see if they were breathing. No breaths. I then checked for a pulse. Nothing. The gravity of the situation quickly became apparent. This was the real thing.

The person was lying on their side. Not the optimal CPR position. I had to make the call to turn the person onto their back. This may seem like a trivial decision but from the situation at hand it was quite possible that we would permanently damage the person’s spinal cord in the process. I repeatedly whispered the mantra “life over limb” as I did my best to instruct the other two gentlemen on how to roll the person over while I stabilized their neck.

With the person on their back I opened their airway and gave the businessman with the cell phone a quick lesson on chest compressions. I took on the job of being this person’s external lungs. As I went down for the first breath I could smell the smoke and God knows what else emanating from their mouth. This wasn’t a sterile St. John’s Ambulance dummy. This was a human being whose life was in my lungs and in the arms of the businessman with the cell phone. Breath one. I almost throw up. It was getting too real for me. I wanted to quit but knew I couldn’t.

What they don’t tell you in first aid class is how frigging hard it is to get air into someone else’s lungs. It felt like blowing into a milk carton. A little would go in then your lips would burst off and air would go rushing across your face. Thump thump thump (times five)...... breath…...dry heave…..repeat…. This was life reduced to its core elements; oxygen getting to tissue. Mortgage payments, car repairs, problems at home, business dealings, they all disappear immediately into irrelevance when you’re just worried about getting air into lungs so that the businessman’s chest compressions could carry it to the brain of the stranger in front of you on the freezing ground.

That is when the angel appeared. The angel took the form of a passerby who happened to be a nurse from the local hospital. She asked if she could help. I thought she could. She volunteered to do the breaths while I switched to the chest compressions the businessman with the cell phone had been performing. I thought chest compressions would be easier and not as sickening. They weren’t. Feeling the limp body of a stranger shake under the weight of your body as you squeeze their chest cavity to compress their heart is not a good feeling. The nurse knew what she was doing much more than I up at the mouth end of things.

We eventually heard the cry of the ambulance a few blocks away. It could have been half an hour or seven minutes since the call. You don’t think about time in situations like this. When they arrived, the paramedics looked out their windows at us as I thumped the stranger’s chest and the nurse put in a breath. They got the “we better hurry” look on their faces and jumped out. The male paramedic relieved the nurse and put a mouth valve over the person’s mouth. That’s handy I thought. I continued to thump away on the stranger’s chest. The lady paramedic then rushed in with a device that had an LCD screen and sticky things that attached to the person’s chest. I was officially relieved of my chest compression duty.

The male paramedic asked me to help get the stretcher out of the ambulance. I did. We put the stretcher down beside the stranger on the sidewalk and the paramedics told us we’d be moving them onto it. “Just grab their pants and heave” they said. I asked “Shouldn’t we put a neck brace on them”. That is when I received a look from a human being I’ve never seen before. The look was from the male paramedic. He looked me directly in the eyes and said something like “We don’t need to worry about that right now”. It took me a second to register what he was really saying with his eyes. Then I quickly realized and grabbed a pant leg and heaved.

We strapped the stranger into the stretcher and took them to the back of the ambulance. All the while the lady paramedic had the device hooked up and was giving them breaths. As the stranger disappeared behind the closed doors of the ambulance a sense of “what now” came over me. I just don’t go home after something like that. My mouth still tasted like this person. That is when the police showed up.

The police asked us the order of events. What we did. The decisions we had made. They took our names and numbers and said we could go. As I stood there I looked over at the ambulance and noticed it rocking. You could see through the windshield that the male paramedic was still giving the stranger chest compressions. I just stood there as my brain replayed through the events of the previous half of an hour.

My docile pondering was rudely interrupted by Satan himself. Satan took the form of an annoying lady who was a patron of a restaurant across the street and came out to gawk at the scene. Hey, I’ve gawked at many a scene so I couldn’t blame her for that. But she was different. She marched across the street, through the small crowd, by the police car, and directly up to me. “What happened” she demanded in an annoying tone that indicated she didn’t want to know because she cared but because she wanted to tell her bridge club the next day. I told her I didn’t know. She told me I must know since I was there the whole time. I told her I wasn’t sure what had happened. She then asked me how the person was hurt. I told her I didn’t know. She then told me that I must really know because I performed CPR on the person (she apparently saw that from the window of the restaurant). I told her I didn’t know. She then asked me who the person was. I said I didn’t know. She huffed like a reporter who just got a “no comment” from her lead source. After a few moments she got up the nerve to ask another question. “Was it a suicide?”. I told her I didn’t know and that she was nosy and I wasn’t going to answer any more of her questions. She looked as if I had just denounced her mother. But she left me alone and moved on to the businessman with the cell phone.

With nothing left to do but stand around and freeze I decided to head back to my original destination, if I could remember what it was. When I got there a friend of mine who is a doctor voluntarily called the emergency room and got the word from the inside. The person had died on the scene from massive internal injuries. The person had committed suicide by jumping off of a tall building.

That night I mostly spent awake thinking. A street person, someone I’m absolutely positive I’ve walked by a dozen times this year on my way to get a caramel latte, decided that life wasn’t worth living. It blew my mind. Why? What would lead or push someone to that. Was it because it was getting cold outside and they couldn’t face another freezing winter? Was it because they couldn’t get a job or because they couldn’t afford to eat? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the want of life could be overthrown by cold or hunger. Then it dawned on me that the cold and hunger were side effects of something else. Something bigger. This person probably wasn’t loved or at least didn’t feel loved. That made more sense to me at three in the morning.

I then, in my head at three in the morning, blamed society for not loving this person. For not taking care of them. For not making sure that they were warm and well fed. I blamed the city government for letting citizens cry NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) when homeless shelters were proposed. I blamed the institutions that are supposed to care for these people. And then I realized with a sense of clarity one can only feel when they realize Truth itself. I am society. I am the government. I am a part of everything that I blame.

All of the problems I see in the institutions and organizations around me are magnified versions of what I see in the mirror. Society is made up of people just like me. People who step around the those in need on their way to get super grande extra hot caramel lattes.

As Donald Miller writes in “Blue Like Jazz” – I am the problem.