life

A couple of days ago, I experienced watching someones life being taken away. I've never seen a death, and it was a very confronting image to watch and to take in. After finishing work on a friday, I headed up to the station as per usual. The weather was 30 degrees and extremely humid, it had been storming earlier with the CBD in chaos with flash flooding, it definitely felt like it wasn't your average day. When I arrived at Flinders street station, there was a train that had just arrived on platform 4, so naturally, people were departing onto the platform.

Where I was standing, I was right infront of a door where people were coming out of, in particular, a fairly old tally skinny man with white hair was about to step off he train when all of a sudden, he had collapsed. Panic arose when he fell to the ground and his face was a flush of red and purple. A woman, who I'm not sure if she was affiliated to the man, but I am going assume it was his wife, fell to her knees beside him and was shaking him, attempting to wake him from his unconsciousness. I looked at the man lying on the ground, and I saw that the red and purple from his face were starting to disappear and leaving his face white. It completely terrified me. I had never seen someones face look that white and lifeless. It was then that the woman realised that he wasn't breathing and started to resuscitate him. She was crying.

I watched her perform CPR on the man for 25 minutes before paramedics had finally come, along with metro staff that were keeping the large crowd that had gathered at a reasonable distance. I saw the paramedics perform CPR for another 10 minutes but my train had arrived by then and I didn't stay to see what happened in the end. Maybe the man had lived, I am not sure. But seeing a body with no color and lying on the ground motionless.. I honestly didn't know how I felt at the time. I was upset, yes, but I was more terrified.

I was also irritated. The crowd that had gathered, I felt that most of them were being so inconsiderate. I know, we as humans are naturally nosey, but I don't know what lets a young man in his early 20's go up to the scene, pull out his phone and start taking pictures and filming of the scene. It made me angry. Why would you do that? Why would you want evidence of something like that on your phone? Two girls who looked slightly younger than me stood infront of where I was to try and poke their nose into what was happening, I saw them giggle and whisper to each other. Why are you smiling? Don't you see that something sad had just happened? What is happy about this situation that makes you want to smile?

People die every day. But it almost seems as if nobody cares anymore. Just because you don't know the person, doesn't make it any less upsetting for me. Life is precious. Don't take it for granted.