This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.