The Death Blog — Shadows / St. Theresa

This is the seventeenth installment of The Death Blog

Shadows

Teresa was working in La Siesta Motel when I met her. That’s a bit outside of my usual territory but she actually lives on the Upper West Side.

One of my favourite songs of all time is ‘St. Teresa’ by Joan Osbourne so when I saw Teresa hunched over the bathroom sink scrubbing at some hardened toothpaste I absolutely searched for the song and slipped in my earbuds.

As those opening twangy chords buzzed against my ears I watched Teresa. She walked around the room, flitting from one thing to the next that either looked like someone who didn’t know what to do with herself or else someone really focused on the tasks at hand — depending on how you looked at it.

Teresa was about to die of a heart attack. Nothing new there. Happens often enough. She wasn’t too old, though, which sort of surprised me. Even now I’m still a bit shocked when I get a call to cull someone young who dies of a massive coronary or an embolism or something like that. By now I should be used to the bodies of the young giving out in much the same way older ones do.

I should be. But I’m not.

Teresa was set to pop at 11:32 in the morning and she went right on time. She fell to the floor, thrashed around…