August 24, 2001

• The Seattle Times: Death gets too close to notice
  
  I had planned to write about happier subjects today.
  
  My personal day was good, in fact. But at 4pm I got the news that we were doing another Women in Black vigil next Wednesday, August 29.
  
  Tuesday morning Lukas David Stidd was sitting at a picnic table in a park across from the Seattle Times office building. Staff and reporters passed him all morning, noting that his long hair was tied neatly back, that he was wearing a wristwatch and tan suede Converse shoes, that he had his head down on the table.
  
  What nobody noticed was that he was dead.
  
  Eventually the landscapers called security, security called the paramedics, and the paramedics announced that Lukas was dead. Then everyone was shocked awake, For the next day, Times columnist Nicole Brodeur said, "cynics went soft, and minds surged with memories of other we have lost and found." "What's the lesson?" she asks, and decides, "Maybe it is to pay better attention."
  
  When I showed the story to Wes he said, "Maybe the lesson is to bring everybody in off the street, duh!"
  
  He used a harsher word that "duh" but I never know who's reading these logs, so I try not to cuss.
  
  No decision is in about what Lukas died of; there was no trauma to the body, no obvious signs of a reason. One of the women in our building who also lived on the streets said, when I told her about it, "Well, he probably died of natural causes; just slipped off in his sleep gently."
  
  I don't want to die that gently.
  

  • 8:11 pm
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