I stood on a street in Pawtucket today, surrounded by strangers, watching a tragedy unfold.
And hours later, I am still struggling with what I witnessed. Not because death is unfamiliar to me. Quite the opposite. I have spent over two decades working in hospice and funeral service. I have sat beside people taking their final breaths, held grieving families in my arms, and witnessed the kind of heartbreak that changes people forever.
I thought I had become accustomed to the many ways death enters our lives. But today was different. There were police vehicles, emergency responders, blocked streets, and people gathered nearby trying to understand what was happening. I was among them. I was curious, too. I wanted to know what was going on, whether everyone was safe, and what had brought so many emergency personnel to an otherwise ordinary neighborhood.
And as I stood there, looking at the people around me, I began to feel deeply uncomfortable. Because somewhere beyond the police tape, behind the doors of a home, there was a human being experiencing something none of us standing outside could possibly understand.
And we were watching. On Monday afternoon, Oct. 12, police responded to a residence on Rowe Avenue in Pawtucket following reports of gunfire during an attempted eviction. After attempts to make contact with the occupant, officers discovered that an individual had died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. A life had ended. I don’t know this person’s name. I don’t know their story. I don’t know whether they had children, what made them laugh, what they loved, or what dreams they once had for their future.
I don’t know what happened in their life before today, and I would never presume to understand what brought them to that moment.
But I know they were somebody. Somebody who was once a child. Somebody who had birthdays and ordinary mornings, favorite foods and familiar places. Somebody who had lived an entire life before becoming the subject of a breaking news story.
And I cannot stop thinking about how easily we lose sight of that. Standing there today, I found myself thinking about the strange relationship we have with tragedy. We are drawn to it. We want to know what happened. We gather, we watch, we speculate, and sometimes we forget that what we are witnessing isn’t a television show or a story unfolding on social media.
It is someone’s life. I include myself in that reflection because I was standing there, too. Perhaps that is what unsettled me most. I wasn’t looking at the crowd from somewhere outside of it. I was part of it. And at some point, I found myself wondering whether we were giving enough thought to the person whose suffering had brought us all to that street.
I don’t believe most people gather at scenes like this out of cruelty. I think we are naturally curious, sometimes frightened, and often desperate to make sense of things we don’t understand.
But curiosity and compassion should never be strangers to one another.
There is a family somewhere tonight whose world may have changed forever.
Maybe they are sitting together trying to make sense of what happened. Maybe someone is staring at a phone, wishing they had made one more call.
Maybe there are conversations being replayed, questions being asked, and memories suddenly taking on a meaning they never had before.
Or perhaps they are simply sitting in silence because there are moments when grief leaves us without words.
I have been with enough grieving families to know that the hours following a sudden death can feel almost unreal. The rest of the world continues moving while yours has come to a complete stop. People still go to work. Traffic still moves. Dinner still needs to be made. Tomorrow morning, someone will pour a cup of coffee and scroll past today’s headlines.
But for the people who loved this person, tomorrow will not be an ordinary Tuesday.
And neither will the Tuesday after that. There will be a first holiday without them. A birthday that feels different. A familiar place that suddenly hurts to visit. There may be belongings left exactly where they were, and a thousand little reminders that someone who was here yesterday is no longer here today. That is the part of death I wish more people understood. It doesn’t end when the emergency vehicles leave.
I also cannot ignore the circumstances surrounding today’s tragedy. The thought of someone facing the possibility of losing their home is heartbreaking in itself. A home is so much more than four walls and a roof. It represents security, independence, memories, and the comfort of having somewhere in this world that belongs to you. For someone already struggling, the prospect of losing that stability can be frightening and overwhelming.
We don’t know whether that fear contributed to this person’s death, and suicide is far too complex to attribute to any one circumstance. But we do know that people in our communities are hurting. Some are struggling financially. Some are isolated. Some are carrying burdens that remain invisible to the people they encounter every day. And sometimes, the people who appear to be holding everything together are the very ones who need someone to notice that they aren’t.
I wish compassion came more naturally to us before tragedy occurred. I wish we were as interested in people’s struggles while they were alive as we become in the circumstances surrounding their deaths. I wish asking someone how they are doing, and genuinely wanting to hear the answer, were as common as sharing the latest breaking news.
And I wish we could remember that every person we encounter is living a life just as complicated, meaningful, and fragile as our own.
I don’t have answers for what happened on Rowe Avenue today. I don’t know whether anything could have changed the outcome, and I won’t pretend that I do. What I have is a profound sadness for a person I never met and a family whose grief I can only imagine.
I also have a renewed awareness of how important it is to protect someone’s dignity, particularly when they are at their most vulnerable. Working with death has taught me many things, but perhaps the most important is that every life deserves to be recognized as more than the circumstances of its ending. Nobody should be remembered only for their worst moment. Not for their financial difficulties. Not for an eviction. Not for a mental health crisis. And certainly not for the way they died.
They deserve to be remembered for having lived.
Tonight, I keep thinking about the people who stood along that street, myself included. We will all go home to our families, return to our routines, and eventually move on from what we witnessed. But somewhere, a family is beginning a journey through grief they never asked to take. And somewhere on Rowe Avenue, there is a home that will never hold quite the same meaning again.
I hope the next time we find ourselves drawn toward someone else’s tragedy, we remember to look beyond the flashing lights and the police tape. I hope we remember there is a person at the center of it all. Someone with a story we may never know. Someone who mattered.
Today, I stood among a crowd watching a tragedy unfold. Tonight, I am thinking about the person we couldn’t see. And more than anything, I wish their story had ended differently.
