The Lessons of James Iglesias

When I was interviewing with my current employer, one of the questions they asked me was this:

“Sometimes, we make mistakes on the job. Sometimes we can’t help a situation, and we have to live with that for the rest of our lives. Is that something you can handle?”

I have been in situations before that call for life-or-death decisions, even before I became a dispatcher. In fact, there is no sight that I will carry on my conscience like the one of that fateful night, the eighth chilly spring night of April, 2017. It was a harrowing experience, seared forever in my mind like the blistering scar left by a branding iron on a bull's back.

He was young. Too young to die. At the scene of the accident I placed him in his late twenties; later I would learn from the internet articles that he was thirty-eight. 

He had a daughter-- Sadie, only a child-- and a beautiful wife named Ana. He was one year older than my father, and the chilling notion that it could have been our family torn apart by such a tragedy was like a cold glass of water being poured on my face. 

He was handsome, with brown eyes and dark skin, hair twisted back into tight cornrows. 

He was handsome. Now he is dead.

My family had been on our way home from the city. My parents, two younger brothers, and I had all loaded up into my dad's car and were headed back from a family event, engaging in a lively familiar chatter when we saw the accident. 

Horror flooded into me like a tidal wave. I experienced a sensation that has since become a daily part of my life: the swift and thorough invigoration of adrenaline that clears the mind and widens the senses. 

My father swerved to pull over, blocking the nearest lane from traffic. For a single suspended moment, a moment simultaneously instantaneous and frozen in time, I felt as though I were being lifted off my seat and held midair by some unseen force. Perhaps it was the night itself that raised me up like a doll, or a statue, locked in place. The thought crossed my mind that this angle was risky. For just the duration of a single inhale, I could feel the phantom headlights closing in on us. My skin tingled with dreadful anticipation, and I was sure that we were soon to join the calamity as a secondary crash.

There was no secondary crash. Just as quickly as it had come, the moment of panic slipped away as my dad clamored out of the driver’s seat and disappeared into the fray. As soon as the breath returned to my lungs, I followed his lead, joining the small but growing crowd rushing to the scene. A man who swiftly identified himself as an off-duty EMT. A woman who began to scream and scream, her voice joining the cacophony that became the soundtrack of that night.

We found the place where the crushed-in drivers' side door held captive a man struggling to survive. My father and the EMT deliberated on whether to pull the dying man out or leave moving him for the professionals, but the smell of leaking gas, smoke, and danger in the air convinced them that they had to get him out. 

“I need to--” he was gasping. “I have to…”

I think he was telling us he needed to get out of the car. He needed air. 

Over the course of about fifteen minutes, my father and the EMT managed to wedge the door off of the car enough to work a very battered crash victim from the smoking hunk of metal. 

And so there, for the first and last time, I met James Iglesias. Meeting him under different circumstances, I might have asked his name. Might have made polite small-talk about the weather, or asked what he did for a living. Instead I witnessed him take his last breaths.

Somehow, amidst the chaos, I noticed the blood trickling down the spaces between his braids, much as how something unseen filled the vacant spaces between particles of reality. Savage red gleamed with reflections of the headlights, and I saw in my mind not tightly-woven hair, but rows of crops: ancient Egyptian barley, planted so they could draw life from the silt of the Nile. As the first plague spread, turning crystal waters into thick, pungent blood, row by row the stalks fell dead to the earth, poisoned by the wrath of the Old Testament God.

At some point, the animal cries of the screaming woman untangled themselves from the sounds of the night, and I became aware of a growing rasp straining the intermittent breaths. There were enough people tending to the dying man, and I couldn’t stand there, staring uselessly at his scalp, any longer. Not when I might be of use elsewhere. 

It only took me a moment to find the source. She was middle-aged. I don’t know if she really did look like my mother, or if I just remember her like that since what she actually looked like was not an important enough detail to stick in my mind. 

It’s strange to think that I have no idea what color her hair was, considering I spent the next few minutes with my hands on her shoulders, talking her down from the ledge of hysteria. 

“Do you pray?” I asked her. I myself am not the praying type, or at least I wasn’t anymore by that point in my life. She, however, was, and so I instructed her to close her eyes and join me in prayer.

“Father God, we come to You in this moment feeling frightened and helpless. We are so small, Lord, and this… this is big. This moment right now is too big for us to handle alone, God, so we come before You and ask for Your strength…”

Whether or not I believe in God in my everyday life, and whether or not she did or does to this day, I know that it was God-- be him a power of the supernatural or simply a soothing psychological mechanism to which we adhere when we are scared-- that drew her down from her hysteria. When I heard my finale of “Amen” echoed from her trembling lips, I knew she would remain grounded now, whatever happened.  

As I worked on calming the panicked woman, the dying man was running out of time. I would later learn that a rib had punctured his lung, and he was suffocating on his own blood. 

Beside the wreckage of the vehicle were dozens of scattered papers: the documents once tucked safely in the glove box, identifying it as the one registered to Joseph Iglesias. That must have been where my dad got the name Joe, which I could hear him using as I returned to the center of things, re-centered now by the respite offered by the brief intermission.

Somebody-- the EMT, perhaps, or even my father, comfortable as always with taking initiative-- started compressions when the man went unconscious. The feverish counting sparked a memory, the famous CPR training advice: the rate of compressions should roughly match the beat of the disco classic “Stayin' Alive.”

How cruelly ironic it was. Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive. Stayin’ alive. He surely wasn’t stayin’ alive. If he was, we wouldn’t be here, desperately pumping his chest while my brother went car to car looking for an AED.

Desperately, my father tried to keep “Joe” alert, even as he took turns giving compressions. Tried to draw conversation from the man’s bleeding lips by asking, “Did you see the game last night, Joe? Tell me about it, Joe.” He tried to invoke his emotional response with, “Do you have kids, Joe? Stay with me for your kids, Joe.” 

When nothing else worked, he returned to simply, “Hey! Stay with me, Joe!”

Like a mantra he repeated it until the ambulance arrived, strapping the corpse of a man who was just moments ago alive, racing down the highway. He’d probably been driving as fast as he had been in order to feel just that: alive. It was probably the rush of pavement disappearing beneath his tires, of traffic blurring into meaningless stripes of red and white light that made him feel the most alive. It had also been the thing to kill him.

The last thing I saw of “Joe”-- of James Iglesias-- was his body being loaded into the back of the ambulance, his chest seeming to turn to rubber beneath the vigorous pumping of a machine: a steel piston fixed to what looked almost like a boxing glove that pounded into his chest to the beat of Stayin’ Alive. I had never seen such a machine before. 

As we left the scene, my mother held me to her own chest. I felt her heartbeat: regular, if a bit elevated. “Do you think he has a chance?” I asked her. The adrenaline was gone, and I felt limp in her arms.

Sadly she shook her head. “He’s already gone. There’s likely nothing they can do.”

She supported me as we walked together towards the car, my boots crunching through glass. The hard plastic soles, not yet broken in, would never soften or mold to my feet, as I disposed of the entire outfit later that night. It was brand new: a flowy bohemian-style skirt, soft turtleneck blouse, low brown lace-up boots all purchased for the very event that had placed us on the road that night, fated to be worn only once. Even if I had been able to purge from the fabric that stench of gasoline, I wouldn't have wanted the reminder of that night. I already had enough reminders, burned permanently into my memory. Blood running down the spaces between his braids. Gasoline fumes overpowering the smell of liquor from his breath. BMWs. Crunching metal and shattering glass, the screams that grew hoarser and more desperate with each reprise. Sensations that will forever haunt me and remind me of him. 

A week later, I took the road test to obtain my driver's license. The test instructor gave me his spiel before the test, the one where he makes us all raise our right hand and vow to obey the rules of the road, show respect to the law, and refrain from operating a vehicle under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I felt no hesitation in repeating the oath. The lesson of James Iglesias lived on.

I’ve never been good at letting things go. I tend to overthink the things that bother me, often becoming obsessed. I run through things in my head again and again, pressing on the painful ones like a bruise I can’t seem to just leave to heal. James Iglesias was no exception. 

Three years after the accident, I lapsed into obsession once again, letting myself pore over old newspaper articles and even a blog post slamming Iglesias himself for causing the accident that ended his life.

“I have not an ounce of sympathy for this guy,” the author of one slam article chides. “I know it’s not kind to speak ill of the dead, but, he could have taken an innocent little boy with his whole life ahead of him, all to prove he had a bigger dick than the other guy on the road that night.”

I don’t remember exactly when I decided I wanted to speak with James' widow, but at some point in 2020, the thought occurred to me and wouldn’t leave me be. So I started to dig. Through a combination of social media and public records, I eventually tracked her down. 

“Hi Ana,

You don’t know me, but my name is Dizzy, and I was there the day that your husband died. If you don’t want to speak with me I will respect that. I have no interest in harassing you or dredging up the past so if you choose not to reply to this message I will not push the matter or contact you again. But I wanted to reach out and at least offer you some closure, if I can, by talking about what I witnessed that night. You can call me at this number if you are interested.”

I got the call later that night. I told her that I had been one of the vehicles that pulled over after witnessing the crash, and that my father and I were among the strangers who stayed on scene to try to help save James' life. 

“I was told he had died on impact,” she said. 

My heart sank. Did I have the right to be doing what I was doing? Would it really do Ana any good to reveal to her that he had actually been conscious for several long, painful minutes before succumbing to his injuries? 

I decided that she deserved the truth. I couldn’t promise her he hadn’t suffered for those last few moments, but there was one thing I could give her that might bring her comfort. 

“I just wanted you to know that… he didn’t die alone, and that we never, not for one moment, gave up on him.” 

She was silent, and I wondered again if I had only made things worse by reaching out.

“You have a daughter, right?” 

“That’s right. Sadie.” 

“How old is she now? If I may ask.”

“She’s…” Ana swallowed so hard, I could hear the click in her throat from the other end of the line. “She’s starting high school this year.”

I ached all over at the thought of the little girl in my imagination, now just a few years off from learning to drive herself.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said weakly. “I know that nothing I say can ever bring him back, or heal the pain his death must have left.”

Ana wanted to know what happened in those moments after the crash, before the ambulance arrived. I talked her through it, leaving out the more gory details. 

“We thought his name was Joe,” I said. “I think it was on the registration papers.” 

A sound, something halfway between a laugh and a sob, slipped out of her. “His brother,” she told me. “Sadie's uncle. He really stepped up for her after James passed.”

In the end, there wasn’t much I could tell her as far as why he died. All I was able to do was paint a picture for her, and promise her that we had done everything we could.

“I just thought you deserved to know that he wasn’t alone, and even now he isn’t forgotten,” I said at last. “I think about that night often, and I think about him, and about his family. About how many people pulled over to stay with him and try to help. Even if there was nothing we could do, at least he didn’t die alone.”

For all of our flaws, humans are remarkable, too. Our instinct is to help,
even when it's a stranger. Even when it's hopeless, we want to help.

Ana thanked me and we hung up. We never spoke again, because after all, what was I to her? Who was I to her, or Sadie, or even James? Just a stranger, passing in the night. A witness only by pure happenstance.

Kenneth took a call like that today. A rollover with multiple ejections, several injuries-- one requiring air evac-- and at least one death. 

I was at breakfast with Kara when it happened, and the notification gave us the opportunity to talk about it. It was, after all, one of the formative experiences that led me to the decision to pursue a career in emergency services. It was here that I told her the same thing I told them at my interview.

“In the end, I’ll never know if we made the right calls that night,” I admitted. “They always tell you not to move someone who was in a collision, in case there was spinal damage. But we made the executive decision to pull him out because he couldn’t breathe. And when he went unresponsive, we started CPR. I think he died of a punctured lung, possibly caused by a broken rib. I’ll never know if the compressions prolonged his life, or sped along his demise. But in the end, we made the call that we thought was right. We did what we believed would give him the best chance of survival.”

At the end of the interview, Kenneth told me, “You made the right call, by the way. If the choice is between their life and the risk of paralysis--”

“You heed the rules of triage,” I finished. “The greatest threat takes first priority.” 

He nodded. “Exactly. They won’t be walking anyway if they’re dead. You did the right thing.”

I knew that, but it was nice to hear anyway.