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I SECOND THAT EMOTION: Feelings and dealing with the dead

© Elizabeth Becka Lansky

It was the dog that got to me.

Okay, it was two o’clock in the morning, so maybe I was getting a little punchy, but when the TV showed a claymation short about a dog wandering through an empty house, remembering his happy puppyhood with his young master and shedding a tear at the bittersweet memories of lost days, I started to cry. I had to concentrate hard to hide my watery eyes from my partner and the M.E. staff.

Now, in the very next room, lay the slowly cooling body of a young man, surrounded by dramatic blood spatter, who had been stabbed to death by a housemate. Did I give the slightest crap that this kid was dead?

No.

Does that make me sick? Callous? Cold as ice?

No. It makes me a professional. I had been accustomed to seeing two to three homicides per week, and I’ve never shed a tear for any of them...but the weeping dog just broke me. I am not a cold person. News flash: Forensic scientists and coroner/M.E. staff are not heartless ghouls. I can’t help but resent the fact that shows like ‘Quincy’ and ‘C.S.I.’, as well as books such as Kathy Reich’s excellent Temperance Brennan series, tend to go to great lengths to show forensic scientists as getting emotionally involved in their cases. Now, this is what creates drama, but it also worries me into thinking that perhaps I’m just shallow and callous. The truth is, if these people really got emotional over each and every case, they should get into another line of work. No one is strong enough to take that kind of emotional wear and tear.

And frankly, the guy was a jerk anyway. But even if he had been Mother Theresa, I still would have been more concerned over a clay dog.

Weeping for your victims will not help them. It will certainly not help you. You can do a thorough and professional investigation without losing sleep over a dead mother of three. An emotional investment is not required. You either make your peace with dead bodies on the first day or two, or you switch careers. There’s no other way to do it.

If you’re writing a mystery about a forensic scientist, should you keep all this in mind? No…it would be advisable to give them nightmares over their latest victim. After all, you’re writing drama, not reality. The fact that most forensic scientists are not obsessed with their jobs, actually have lives outside work, care more about their families than their victims, do housework, go on vacation and have garage sales will not sell books. I’m only telling you this to set the record straight, not to give advice on writing.