Death investigators know best - life is short.
I’m using a fancy website tool now to send my newsletters so please let me know if and when it doesn’t work. As I was working with my coach this week, I must have sounded a little exasperated at all the tech, so we stopped. We turned on some of my favorite music right now (Salmonella Dub!) and dug really deep into WHY I am doing all of this in the first place. I get up at 5am almost every day to plug along at SquareSpace. I’m reading all I can about sleep, and trauma, and alcohol. I’m meeting other people like me, who love their jobs and hate what it has done to their lives. Yes, I’m building an empire and it takes work. But the WHY is what drives me. We are a special group right here – we know better than anyone else – LIFE IS SHORT. This might be the very last day we have on this earth so let’s make it the best dang day we ever lived. Let’s build the life we don’t want to numb against. Let’s build relationships with loved ones, friends, and coworkers that we’re excited to show up for. Let’s relieve ourselves of things that don’t serve us anymore; let them inform our future selves and build strong boundaries to stay true to our values. We can be intentional about our lives because no one else is going to do it for us. We deserve to be happy, healthy, and at peace.
Whew – after she took me on this deep dive, I was refreshed and back at it. Up again this morning at 5am. Writing! Learning! Today, it feels great again – sharing this information gives me energy and drives my passion.
If you’re interested in using this tactic in your life, give me a shout – it’s a really fun tool to help you reframe when you might be feeling stuck.
The last I left my story, I was about to complete my one-year post-graduate fellowship as a Casualty Analyst in the WWII Directorate of the Department of Defense POW and Missing Personnel Office (DPMO). How about that story of the recovery of PFC Buddy Bayne?! – can you believe that the family actually invited me to the funeral and publicly thanked me for never giving up on their uncle? Out of all of the places in the world, this family was from just outside of Baltimore, within 30min of where I grew up. The synchronicity of my path was clear – the east coast was home and the opportunities would keep coming as long as I allowed them. For the month of September, I spent every day at the New York City – Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I watched autopsies roll in every day; folks who had died in Manhattan the day before. A bike courier who was struck by a taxi, a 400lb man who jumped from his 32nd floor balcony and had patio furniture impaled in his abdomen, drug overdoses, unclaimed homeless people. I met the people who kept the office running – the forensic pathologists, the toxicologists, the death investigators, the administrative assistants, the morgue techs, the anthropologists. They were all unique, a little weird, hilarious, and very dedicated to their clients. After rounds, I’d hang in the anthropology unit, making casts of trauma to be used to testify in a dismemberment case, taking public bone samples to test an aging method, and creating slides for bone histology. And then we’d eat lunch! It was all very normal; these professionals doing their professional things. Regrettably, not a single skeletal case or clandestine grave recovery was reported in September of 2009. So the month concluded, and I went back to DC to finish the fellowship and plot my next move.
I can’t wait to share more of my updates with you next week!
Kat
