Cringe Alert

As I was preparing to head out to roller derby I received my first call to a clean up for work. A 15 year old boy has shot himself with a shot gun. They say it was an accident but who knows. We just say it is a suicide.
My job in crime scene clean up is a unique look into the grieving process. A lot of the time family or friends will be present while you are cleaning. However tonight that was not the case, the boy lived (without a jaw and nose) so the Mother was at the hospital. We knew if he didn't live she would show up. She never showed up, he is in surgery at this very moment.
We are there not to question the family, such as with the police, and we are not the funeral directors trying to sell a funeral (even though I know many funeral directors are serious about helping people in grief many of those grieving people believe funeral directors are just trying to rip them off). We are there for hours just to clean up the mess so the people who are close to those bone fragments don't have to. Sometimes that means we are told everything about who we are cleaning up after, sometimes there is no emotion at all. Is it our job to judge whether lack of emotion is due to shock or simply the lack of emotion? Nope. But we are involved in a deeply personal process. That is why people will open up in a different way than to anyone else.
Tonight the boy shot himself in the entry way but we had to clean the entry way, the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the stairs to the basement and the front steps outside.
While I was at the scene I was joking along with the others and bonding with my co workers. It is a career where you have to make jokes or else it eats you alive. When around death it's important to remember the reasons we are alive. Laughter is one of those reasons. It is also a job where you automatically connect with the people you work with. You never forget your first and I was not the only first timer there tonight. It was not just my first suicide, it was Tyler's too, there was someone else experiencing it the way I was. No matter what our pasts were I felt a connection with him. It's a deeply personal connection to share with people you just met, holding pieces of another human being. I wasn't alone in being curious what parts of the body the bone and skin came from.
All in all I was surprised at how easy it was to clean up the gooey insides of a teenage boy. Then I had to drive home. The job was up in Roy so I had about 45 solitary minutes to process my last 4 hours. What came to mind you wonder? The fact that I will never be able to see a Guitar Hero guitar the same way ever again. I know it's nothing compared to what I will see in the future (another coworker today at a different job found half a brain pretty much in tact). We were just about finished when I realized we hadn't checked behind the entertainment center. There was a bin full of controllers and the guitars you use for Guitar Hero. I pulled half of his nose off of his "guitar". This boy lived. He will have no idea that we found almost all of his teeth in the carpet and ceiling, and he will have no idea that his nose was on that guitar.
On a scene we arrive in a circumstance where most people don't have the time to clean up any secrets. In crime scene clean up we see the darkest of secrets. We have to clean off every single thing in a room where there might be parts of a human, biohazardous material. Even tonight we found weed pipes and had a laugh over whether it was the mom or the son's. We throw away all of that stuff. Personally I would hate to have my weed pipes thrown away especially in a situation where I need them the most. :-P
Crime scene clean up is a job where you can choose to go deep into what it is about or you can mindlessly clean. What I witnessed tonight is that even "tough guys" and long experianced professionals still need to cope. Do you ever get used to jobs in the death industry? I don't know yet. But I will keep you posted.