The Stranger, Part 2

A body and the search for meaning
[WARNING: content centers around suicide and may be triggering for some readers. If you or someone you know is struggling, please dial 988.]

June 28, 2019

The next week, I went back. The experience felt incomplete, unfocused. I needed to punctuate what I’d seen without the distraction of shock and confusion and rangers and police. A white rose felt like a good piece of grammar. Whether a period or comma, it was too early to tell.

I pulled into a small lot off of South Border Road, near one of the Skyline trailheads. I wondered if this was where she’d parked for the last time. I pictured a dark early-model hatchback or sedan. Did anyone see this long haired woman in a white dress, messenger bag slung over her shoulder, unnerved by the fuel canisters in her hands? How hard was her heart beating? Did she harbor any doubt?

I was also eager to see if any memorials had appeared at the site, signs of a family visit. A note or a teddy bear or one of those tall Virgin Mary candles, anything that would expand her presence in my mind beyond a charred body. Some clue to who she was, a toehold for my imagination.

I’d been scanning online obituaries every morning, but nothing jumped out. The ages didn’t seem right. I guessed she had been in her twenties, but couldn’t be sure. Places of death weren’t listed in the write-ups and didn’t always include pictures. Even if there was a photo, I wasn’t sure I could connect their faces to the one I saw. And if she was from out of state, there might not be a local obit at all.

I’d googled a half-dozen variations on “fire suicide Middlesex Fells” on the off-chance a local news site had somehow gotten wind. All I found was a one-paragraph brief from 2011 about a 20-year-old who had killed himself near a trail head. No details, no manner of death. For such a dramatic and disturbing scene, there was so little to go on.

A few hours after I’d come home that Friday, a detective had called and I went over my story again. He confirmed the person had taken their own life. I asked if he could tell me where they were from, their age, would there be a police report? He said no, that suicides are private matters, that the official write-ups don’t get released to the public. He wouldn’t give me Alex’s contact information, either. Even though I was first on the scene and called in the authorities, that earned me no special privileges. We weren’t working together anymore. He was on one side, I was on the other. I understood, of course. I asked if he could pass on my number when he followed up with Alex. He said he would.

I ambled down a gravelly path, through a patch of trees, and then up the trail, the branches and darkness seeming to close in with every step. I felt conspicuous carrying the paper-wrapped flower in one hand and Hank’s leash in the other and hoped I didn’t run into anyone. I was on edge, nervous, as if something might jump out at me. I was glad Hank was with me. But I wondered if our visits would be the same.

The Fells had been a particularly healing place during the Bad Times. It was where my wife and I turned when our daughter’s descent into opioid addiction hurtled us into the darkest of places. Watching Hank, her beloved boy whom she could no longer care for, in his element, perfectly in context, brought us a measure of comfort as we walked the winding paths and stood on stone outcroppings, mostly in silence, looking out toward the city that was consuming her. And us. We’d been absorbing one gut punch after another: she’d signed herself out of another treatment center; her dealer-boyfriend had burglarized and trashed her apartment; her landlord was sending us bills for broken windows and missed rent (I had unwisely co-signed the lease). I had begun sleeping with a hammer, convinced every hoodie-and-knapsack walking our street was an addict pal or debt collector angling to break in. I changed the locks.

During those times, I ran Hank in these woods every chance I got. Little by little, insulated by a few degrees from the city, from the anguish, I would emerge lighter, sometimes with a fortifying lesson in hand — attack your hills with gusto, let go of the need for control, don’t try to be something you’re not. The Fells became my holy book, the trails my scripture.

But last Friday had thrown everything off. Even though the sun was filtering through the trees and dappling the path like a tourism bureau calendar page, the place felt dark and foreboding. With each step closer, my breathing became more shallow, my heart cocked. Was the place forever spooked, a potential horror beyond every boulder, staring out from every tree hollow, behind the snap of every branch?

I turned onto the Skyline Trail, retracing my steps from that morning, gingerly, almost precisely. Within a few minutes, the Skyline and Cross Fells trails merged. I was close. I recognized the rise and the turn, the top of the large rock. What would I find? My heart was bouncing around my chest like a lottery ball. I realized I’d been holding my breath.

And then there it was, the clearing. I exhaled.

It was anticlimactic as if I was expecting her to still be there. It looked just how it did when I left. Cold, abandoned. Down the path, broken yellow caution tape flapped off a tree. The ash piles were still there, along with a scattering of debris. What had hikers and runners thought as they passed by here the last few days? I picked up a few items: a canister cap, a burned piece of knit fabric as if from a dress, a crushed votive candle holder, a couple of tiny buttons. I was surprised the scene hadn’t been cleaned up. I turned the pieces over in my hands and put several of them in my pocket. There were no signs that friends or loved ones had visited.

I walked around the large rock and into the woods. Maybe the cops missed something. I kicked at the leaves and parted some scrub. Nothing. I returned and leaned the rose against the rock, but changed my mind and instead laid it on the mound of ash, where her body had been. I felt weird being the first one to mark the spot, like I was out of turn, jumping the line. Maybe the family had already visited, but more likely they hadn’t had time, what with the shock and grief and arrangements. Perhaps they weren’t from around here. Maybe they didn’t want to. I lowered my head and said a prayer. To a complete stranger with no name, no connection to me whatsoever, whose only image in my mind conjured a long-ago citizen of Pompeii surprised in the night by a river of fire. I didn’t want to be haunted. Or worse, to forget.

***
The next weekend, I brought my wife to the site. She had been my first and last call from the scene. She looked around in silence as I recounted that morning again. It still hadn’t been picked up, still no memorials. Was it possible she hadn’t yet been identified? My cop friend Sam said that was unlikely. He’d left a message for Sgt. Cosgrove but hadn’t heard back, said he’d try again. On the way back to the car, we hiked up to Wright’s Tower for the view. We stood on the slabs of rock, Interstate 93 winding toward the distant Boston skyline, the new Encore hotel and casino in the foreground glinting in the sun.

We bumped into a ranger opening up the tower door. When she saw Hank, she thanked me for having him on a leash. “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who ignore that rule around here.” “Oh, no problem,” I said, guiltily. I was one of those people a lot of the time. Letting Hank run free, moving in tandem with him, witnessing his wild instincts, was worth the $50 fine. I just happened to clip him up because of the broken glass. But since I was already in sly mode, I cleared my throat.

“I heard there was a suicide in the woods around here last weekend,” I said as we walked up the dim tower stairs, our steps echoing, “someone set themselves on fire?”

I expected her to pause, to wonder how I knew this information, but she didn’t miss a beat.

“Yeah. Awful. Last Saturday.”

It had actually been a Friday. We climbed to the observation deck, which gave out onto the surrounding towns and the treetops of the Fells. Someone had spray painted one section of the ledge with the words, It’s not a crime to wear a smile.

I cleared my throat.

“Fire — man, what a way to go.”

She glanced at me and whispered, “and they mutilated themselves.”

Did I hear that right? Or was my mind playing tricks? Whatever she said was delivered with a hushed confidence. Was that what the knife had been for? Were imaginations off and running at the ranger station? Or was mine? I searched my memory for blood and flesh but came up empty. I wanted to ask her to repeat herself, but didn’t want to appear ghoulish by prying further. Instead, “Were they from around here?”

“Yep.”

That gave me hope. There had to be a local obituary. Information was out there. It was just a matter of finding it. Hopefully before a memorial service, which I’d begun fantasizing about attending. Then the ranger told us about several workshops the reservation was putting on and handed me a pamphlet with a calendar of events.

***
I still hadn’t heard from Alex and wondered if the detective forgot to give him my number. Or if Alex didn’t want to connect for some reason. I logged onto the Facebook page for the Trail Animals Running Club, a local group which held runs in the Fells and staged the winter ultra on the Skyline trail that I’d run the previous year. I wondered if Alex might be a member, too.

I posted to the page, asking for help identifying a young runner I’d recently met in the woods. I’d heard Alex give his last name to the trooper at the scene but I was chatting with Cosgrove. I knew it sounded Spanish or Portuguese and started with an “S,” Salinas or Santos. Within minutes, I got two comments suggesting Alex Silva. I went to his page, and yep, that was him. I recognized the thin beard and the swirling arm tattoos. His profile picture showed him competing in an obstacle course race. He was wearing black spandex shorts and a sleeveless Hawaiian shirt cut off at the belly. Abs everywhere, quads ripped, shining with sweat. And leaping over a fire pit, flames licking at his shoes. I was stunned at the irony.

Alex accepted my Facebook request. I shot him a DM and began scrolling through his feed while I waited for a response. He was originally from Brazil. Fitness was clearly a central part of his life, at least online. There he was, on the first-place podium for a Tough Mudder. A video of him bouldering. A birthday post to his mother. He was 28 years old, in sick shape, and comfortable in a Speedo. The opposite of where I was — pushing 50, in my fourth month of pelvic recovery, still locked in combat with my dad-belly. Then I came across a post he put up that Friday evening, maybe five hours after we’d left the scene.

“I hope no one has to ever come across what happened to me today. This morning, I head out for a trail run at Middlesex Fells near Boston; usually a pretty fun technical trail perfect for training. Just wanted to test out my legs and enjoy the nature, no music at all.

“After 4.5 miles of running, I come across this person on the trail that was caught off guard as I came up. That person immediately put on the ground 2 cans of some kind of flammable chemical and had some other odd stuff nearby, while wearing a non-typical type of clothing for being on the trail.

“I looked at the person and was given a quick wave and smile. I nodded back and said “Hey” and kept running… As I passed that person, I had a weird vibe, just didn’t seem right. But I kept running as I had 1.5 miles left until I would turn around to run back towards my car.

“As I approached the location where I stumbled by this person, I was hoping they wouldn’t be there ’cause it felt very sketchy. As I get closer I see a man there on the phone and as I make the turn, there is a body with a few smoke finishing to burn.

“My mind couldn’t process it at first. I thought it was a mannequin and some kind of black magic. But as I look closer around, it was the person I had seen earlier that just committed a suicide. The man was on the phone with the cops already to come to the location.

“I waited there with him to give the testimony of what I witnessed. At first, I want to describe it as disturbing, scary, crazy, but after all it’s just sad that someone took their own life away.

“A couple of people reached out to me asking if I’m okay and I am fine. Thankfully, I have a strong mind and I’ll get past it. I just want to say, always be kind to others, you never know what someone may be going through and what they can do. My heart hurts to have witnessed that, but I’m okay and will be okay!”

It had almost been a week and I’d only told my wife, Sam, and a good friend. It didn’t occur to me to post to Facebook. It felt too big and unfathomable, too sacred for the fleeting nature of social media. I was keeping it close to the vest, clinging to it almost. But here Alex was processing the experience in public, with his community, his friends, and it appeared cathartic. I was jealous. I greedily scrolled through the comments on his post looking for anyone saying they knew who she was or heard any more details.

There were lots of heartfelt comments. “Prayers for what you encountered.” “Sorry you had to go through that.” “I’m glad you are OK.” He responded to each one, gently steering sympathy toward the victim. “Mental health is real and people need to be more kind.” To another: “Yes indeed kindness and love is what this world needs more.”

One commenter wrote: “Never good to deal with stuff like this. If you find the images ringing in your brain for the next few days, make sure you verbally tell the story several times in detail, even if to the same person so you can shake it. It’s a mild form of PTSD that will get worse if you don’t.”

A few comments later, this:

“Oh, Alex, sorry you had to see that but take comfort knowing (she) got to exchange smiles with one of the nicest men I know.”

I liked that notion, the exchange of smiles. A flash of kindness before death. Though, unfortunately, not disarming enough for second thoughts.

In one of his final replies, Alex wrote, “I’m eventually gonna go there again sometime. But it surely will be hard running there, especially alone, but I can’t let it get in my head.”

We exchanged a few DMs about grabbing coffee, but it never panned out, and I wondered if he’d rather keep things online, or just wanted to put it behind him. He seemed like a nice, enthusiastic guy. Worked as a house painter. A week later, I told him I was going back to the scene and did he want to join? He said thanks but he had a big race that day. I returned alone. My rose was still there, wilted. Still no memorials. I plucked another sleeve button from the ash pile. And took the caution tape down from the tree.

***

“I’d imagine when you’re being burned alive, the pain would be so incredibly intense that you would not even have the capacity to think. Your entire existence would become nothing but a fiery, excruciatingly painful experience.”

That’s what I imagined, too, as I read the post from a guy named Dimitry. A dreaded way to die. There was a reason burning at the stake was a medieval execution. Why hell is depicted awash in flames. I thought of all those poor souls who jumped from the towers at the World Trade Center on September 11 rather than face the fires. I’d been googling self-immolation and burning to death. While widely used for fiery death, “immolation,” actually means “sacrifice.” “Auto-cremation” is the more accurate description. The question-and-answer site Quora had a surprising number of opinions on the subject, including from a second- and third-degree burn survivor named Christiaan B. who was sprayed by a burst radiator:

“Burning is horrible. The level of pain is beyond description. I could see skin falling off my hands and body. It’s almost surreal. You see your body literally falling apart in front of you. You can hear screaming. After a few seconds you realize that it’s you that’s screaming. The mind really isn’t prepared for that level of pain. It is worse than you can possibly imagine.”

Self-immolation accounts for approximately 1% of all suicides in the U.S. and Western Europe and is more frequently associated with mental illness or substance abuse. The majority of victims are male. In lower-income countries, the incidence of self-immolation is surprisingly higher, 40%, with most of the victims female, according to a 2011 study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, an arm of the NIH.

But is it as horrible as it seems? Or worse? What actually happens to the body? I knew that in a house fire, smoke inhalation usually kills you before the flames. But in the open, where smoke would likely drift away in a breeze, that wouldn’t be the case.

I worked at a university in Boston, so I reached out to a couple medical professors and was eventually put in touch with Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a clinical associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University. Like the few other people I’d told, she started out with sympathies. “I’m so sorry. That’s a very traumatic experience.” These condolences made me uncomfortable and I had trouble accepting them. It felt like receiving stolen goods. But for some reason, perhaps because she was a medical professional, someone of authority, I tried to absorb them graciously. “Thank you. I’m good.” But I wondered for a moment if that was true. I quickly moved onto my questions.

“In a death by fire outdoors,” she said, “two things happen very quickly, almost in tandem.”

First, the destruction of the skin cells causes blood pressure to plummet and leads to shock. The circulatory system fails to maintain blood flow, cutting off oxygen to vital organs. This also creates a backup of pressure in the small blood vessels of the lungs, which causes the vessels to leak fluid and build up, and eventually exit the mouth.

At the same time, the oxygen around your mouth and nose is being consumed by the fire and the remaining air is super-heated, so one is both suffocating and searing their throat and lungs. The vocal cords close. The burned epidermis might also contract around the abdomen and rib cage so the victim can’t take deep breaths. Was that why I didn’t hear any screams of pain? There was no air to carry them. Unconsciousness comes quickly, Laposata said, maybe less than thirty seconds. Death, caused by the heart stopping, could take several minutes.

“Are those seconds especially painful?”

“The fire quickly burns off the top layer of skin, which is very thin, and destroys the nerve endings, so any pain is short-lived,” she said. “The worst burns — third degree — are rarely painful. Those are the black, charred areas of major burn victims.”

I was glad to know she likely didn’t suffer, that adrenaline, dead nerves, and lack of oxygen had clouded the pain. But I also realized she was probably still alive when I arrived on the scene. That made me squirm. She died in front of me.

***
A couple weeks later, Sam called. He said he’d finally connected with Sgt. Cosgrove. I held my breath. At last I was going to get some real details. “She wouldn’t give me a name of course,” — my heart sank — “but they were from Abington.”

“And get this,” Sam said, pausing for a beat, “the local police who made the death notification to the mother said it was the third suicide by fire they’d had to make recently.”

I was stunned, and asked Sam to repeat what he’d said. “Third fire suicide from the same town. All transgender.”

I didn’t know what to say. Did they know each other? Copycats? A pact? “That’s completely crazy.”

“Yep,” Sam said in his matter-of-fact cop way.

I knew my next stop. After multiple trips to the scene, countless obituaries and online searches, my answers now lay in a residential community of 15,000, some 20 miles southeast of Boston. Abington was covered by two regional newspapers. Her name, her picture, had to be in one of them.

***

• If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1–800–273–8255 (TALK) (press # 1 if you are a Veteran) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
• The Trevor Helpline: 866–488–7386 (4-U-TREVOR) (specifically for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender youth and young adults)
• Trans Lifeline
  Designed for, and staffed by, people who are transgender.
  U.S.: (877) 565–8860
  Canada: (877) 330–6366
• Here’s what you can do when a loved one is severely depressed.