I got a route with that sent me outside the city into a fairly rural area. For the first delivery, I turned onto a one road neighborhood just off of county road. To get to my first delivery, I had to drive between two rows of Sheriff’s office vehicles. There were two or three marked, and the rest unmarked. The front yard of a house had crime scene tape marking the perimeter. There were detectives in the yard, but I did not see any uniformed officers. The front door of the house was open.

The second delivery turned out to be right across the street from the house, at another house that was set a little ways down a hill, so you couldn’t see the scene. The customer met me at the gate the fence around his front yard. He asked me if the cops were still up there. I said they were, and asked him if he knew what was going on. Apparently, a woman had shot herself in the head, right in front of her husband. He said she had been taken to the hospital, and as far as he knew, she was still alive.

Having had some experience with this sort of thing in the past (I used to work in TV news), there was a lot running through my head, and some of it is still there. I know there are a lot of people who try to kill themselves by shooting themselves in the head – but they wind up with half their head missing, and still alive. In many ways, this can be far more traumatic than if they had succeeded. Either way, life will never be the same for the family in that house. (That sentence is one of those that’s kind of obvious, but when you’re really start thinking about it, there’s an awful lot to unpack there.)

Another unfortunate thing for me, is that it brought back memories of the first time I was sent to a murder-suicide scene. The police officer had gone to his wife’s office and killed her, then shot himself. His body was still there when I arrived. That part wasn’t so bad. It had happened in a parking lot, and the worst part was when the fire department came out and used a hose to wash away the blood, and many little bits of brain and skull. I will never forget that image.