Moving bodies was not in the job description. However, it happened often enough that little was ever thought of security guards, making just over minimum wage, taking-on such responsibilities. To be clear, the bodies were those of humans and the humans were in fact dead and within the context of a hospital, as in most places housing a dead body, it is fair to say that the worst had presumably already happened. Nonetheless, even with the best of intentions and greatest of ease, there will be accidents.
The reality is that there is no easy or graceful way to move a body and, furthermore, the term ‘deadweight’ is difficult to explain if never experienced firsthand. If your time thus far has saved you from such tasks, I do hope you will trust the sincerity of the author when he says that the mass of a vessel, empty of the life it once contained, is truly unique enough to earn its own designation. I understand if you might now be reaching for comparisons as you consider all the times you may have helped an inebriated friend home or an injured teammate off the field. Please allow me to differentiate the apples to the proverbial oranges you may be thinking. If ever you have carried a living person, you are most often holding them as they hold themselves. That is to say, the still active musculature provides a supportive rigidity that makes the body no lighter or heavier in the literal sense and yet in the absence of that rigidity (after every cell has surrendered to time or circumstance as well as gravity) the body takes on an awkward, slumping and cumbersome form that is simply fucking hard to move. And of course; all of this is why I dropped him.
I was fresh out of college at the time and now I am old enough to begin dueling, if only in the most petty of skirmishes, with gravity and time myself. I do not recall his name but I do recall the sound, the hollow sound of his head hitting the floor after I dropped him. Another security guard and I attempted to move him from death bed to the gurney used to deliver him to the morgue in the basement. I remember laughing awkwardly as one does in the presence of absurdity combined with the ignorance of youth and the shame of a post grave mistake.
We doubled our efforts and he did get delivered to the morgue without additional incident. There were more challenges, mishaps and small tragedies and adventures during the rest of my short time as a hospital security guard but nothing lives in my memory like the death and transport of that first body and being unable to hold and move him.
I had always been a skinny kid, a characterization I write reluctantly, trading truth for shame. I did not like being skinny and the mere word itself still bares its teeth at me on the page. But I was one of those kids whose joints seemed swollen in comparison to the stickly appendages that stemmed from them. As late as sixth grade I had to hold the edges of the toilet seat so as not to fall in when seated. I was skinny in a way that openly divulged every secret weakness I hoped to conceal. The world in all of its cruel and casual interjections conflated my slender frame with weakness, fragility and because this cruel world harnesses sexism as its many weapons, femininity was also conflated in my slightness. Nonetheless, if the world was teaching me a lesson I learned it early and well. I say this because though free of the ridicule that lay across the tracks in the more corpulent neighborhood, I learned to hate my weak body and resent a world that saw me as nothing more. As a result, as soon as I could, I began the difficult work of changing my body, meddling with the nature that had stretched me to over six feet during the summer between elementary and middle school into a longer and profoundly more awkward scaffolding. Any muscle afforded to me by puberty was lost to my vertical growth.
I lifted weights with such voluminous exuberance, initially trapping my body under a netting of vascularity but failing to catch any actual muscle. Over time, however, and with more experience, my body stepped away from its scrawny stature and towards a bolder insinuation of strength. Despite choosing fitness as a career and eventually becoming quite knowledgeable in the field, I was rarely sought out as a trainer for anyone interested in getting bigger or stronger.
By and large, men did not want to train with me. My advice in such matters was always secondary to whomever took up more space in the weight room. Imagine if you can, curious boys asking the strongest looking person (never me) in the gym for advice in emulating attributes largely delivered by little more than genetics.
Regardless, I continued to meddle with my own body and, always at a space slower than my most mild ambitions, I grew and, in doing so, I thought I had outgrown the ridicule of my childhood, the bullying of my adolescence and the dismissal of my early adulthood. My newer rendition however proved exponentially calorically expensive to maintain and slowly I also began to surrender some of the leanness, which for so long bared the sole proof that muscles moved my limbs and not some invisible string, for continued expansion and I welcomed a body large enough to engulf my origins in its shadow. Or so I thought.
These changes did not remove a chip from my shoulder and despite the messaging of my industry, I stopped believing that any external change could ever properly subdue the internal conception we come to know as our identity. I was, and somewhere in the permanence of my impermanence think of myself as weak. The weights and the lifting were simply something that I was hoping would change the world's perception of me but failed to change my perception of myself.
Prior to my Mother completely succumbing to her dementia, she and those that loved her experienced months bearing witness to her degradation. Sadly, with that decline, falls became a more common occurrence and perpetual concern. Near the end, those falls delivered her not only to the floor but to a confusion I struggle to explain. Beyond the physical inability to get up on her own, the concept of up as a direction dissipated into the vapor of her disease.
You begrudgingly accept the loss of words. You hold back tears when names are lost as well, but no one was prepared for the loss of up as a direction, concept or option. And so when she fell she could not be helped up in all of the conventional ways you expect to help someone up. No, she had to be lifted and so when those times came I squatted low, gently maneuvered my arms under her, lifted her up off the ground and carried her back to bed. She was still alive but the stability had left her and the body of my wonderful Mother slumped as if it had also forgotten it was ever a body at all. That same slippery dead weight in a body still confined to life as I carefully placed her in the bed and tucked her in as she did for me when I was a child.
I wish I could say we clung to keeping her in the house and in the faith of our own ability to properly and safely care for her as the best most option for her but it was probably more due to our overwhelming ignorance, profound stubbornness and unbearable sadness that kept her so helplessly close to us.
She slipped into a delirium she could not escape and some time soon after she was transferred to a hospital which began her ultimate demise and liberation from a life and body that simply could not support her anymore.
I have spent a great deal of my life perceived as small and weak. I have spent almost as much time trying to obscure that perception through the diligence of my own recasting and I have done just about every exercise you can think of, lifted collectively thousands of pounds for unfathomable repetitions but I know now I will likely never lift anything as important and delicate as my Mother. The whole time I was trying to change who I was, only better prepared me to be what I have always been and will forever remain–my Mother’s son.
Lifting loved ones, be it a newborn child, sick dog or aging parent or sibling may in some circumstances be heavier or lighter than you expected or prepared for but it is never a weight we carry lightly. We hold and carry their weight and the responsibility we feel for them together. The burden of love is not one that can be thrown around, slammed or dropped. It is not moved in the belly of grungy gyms or posh exercise clinics. We hold that precious weight and ourselves together because it is what holds us together.
I still work out and still lift and I know by the strictest definitions of the term I will continue to get stronger until at some point I don't, but I will never feel weak again.
My newest client is a woman who just became a grandmother. Her fitness goal is to be able to pick her grandchild up off of the floor.