See Squared

My first experience in the “field” was one that has stuck with me. I went out as an infant journalist in the first year of my degree & I interviewed a hotshot of the “Crime Scene Decon” world. I had nothing but my iPhone, a small purple pad & pink pen. I must have REEKED of rookie to someone like Peter, who I know had been extensively interviewed after a spate of interest from the media in crime scene cleaners. But I loved it so much. I saw body bags & photos of deceased that had been left so long they had liquefied. It was my first feature article, & I’ve never really topped it for want of a better word:

Peter Guerin faces the grim task of cleaning up after death has knocked on someone’s door. He does what is called crime scene and trauma decontamination. Or CTS Decon. Before the recent boom in such cleaning companies, it was the duty of the deceased’s family to clean up bodily fluids, human remains, blood, brain matter, and any damage left by Police in a residence. Now Peter and his staff at Bioclean step in once law enforcement and the coroner have left.

Source: http://www.bioclean.com.au/images/LogoBioClean.jpg

Peter has the hard exterior and no bullshit attitude of a cop. And this may be from his 30 years of serving in the Police force. His penchant for blood and strong stomach can be attributed to his eight years in Forensic Science and Crime Scene Investigation. It started as a thought in the 80’s, when Peter drove past a Police shooting that had sadly ended in casualties. A cliché sure, but a tiny light in his head just went “bing”, he says.

He sits behind the desk of his Bioclean office on a drizzly morning and seems detached as he speaks. He radiates sterility and wears a hard mask. There seems no regret for what he has seen, and no mourning of any of these people’s deaths. “It’s not me, it’s not my family… I look at it from a biological point of view.”

“I say to everyone on my team, don’t look at the photos. Don’t look at the family photos,” continues Peter. “I know where they suffered… It sounds cold and hard. It’s to preserve yourself.”

He started Bioclean in 2004. He has three full-time staff members and around five casuals. They deal with stomach churning scenarios on a daily basis.

“We don’t just rock up to the supermarket and buy black and gold bleach,” he laughs. Certainly not when tuberculosis or hepatitis is on the cards if his gory job is not done exactly right. Large amounts of blood first clot to jelly then dry into thick crimson flakes when left for a long period of time. “That’s the worst blood because it is airborne,” Peter says.

Peter and his team not only make a tragedy easier to deal with for families, but are potentially also saving their health. HIV remains dangerous for a day, hepatitis B for a whole week and tuberculosis remains a hazard if any solidified brain matter remains.

One of the less disturbing images. Google ‘Crime Scene Decontamination’ at your own risk.

Peter grew up in Surrey Hills NSW, and had a wholesome family. His mother stayed at home to take care of the family and his father was an accountant. He sees himself as the black sheep of the family. Although he has strayed from a more traditional path it seems he is making tracks. Peter has a slew of credentials, all covering the walls of his warehouse office. He boasts playfully of being the Vice President of the American Biorecovery Association and has fewer frames than he does certificates for his qualifications.

When pressed, Peter’s hard façade does falter. Long sighs puncture cocksure sentences when faced with the question of families of the dead. “It helps their grieving process,” says Peter.

The grieving of the families of the deceased is very much apart of the job, especially for Gabrielle Simpson of Clean Queens. While Peter dominates the industry in Melbourne, Gabrielle is based in NSW and brings a feminine and playful touch to a macabre business.

Her van is plastered with the image of a busty maid with glorious cleavage, suggestively holding a feather duster. “They’ll [people on the street] be smiling and looking at the girl… then they see what we do and their faces drop,” says Gabrielle.

She places high priority on the feelings of the family, and the act of softening a traumatic blow. “We go in to make sure the family aren’t stressed… [and] sometimes we get people who may not be able to pay premium prices,” she continues, “I take that into consideration.”

You would be forgiven for thinking Peter seems desensitised. But his partner John, also working for Bioclean, explains he just takes his job very seriously. “That’s just the way he is. It can make him a pain in the arse… he forgets he’s not in the Police force anymore.” John graduated from the Police Academy in 1976, along with Peter.

Peter sits at his desk projecting professionalism, while contrastingly John bustles about the office jovially calling insults and laughing. They bounce off each other like old friends, and their personalities seem to mesh like yin and yang. It’s quite warming, actually. 

Crime Scene and Trauma Decontamination is not just cleaning up what no one else will. There is a raw humanistic element to the job that is arresting to the everyday person. “The trick is to not look into their [a dead bodies] eyes,” says John honestly. “You do see some really sad things,” Gabrielle Simpson also laments.

But Peter seems to have found the right mindset to tackle death and mortality without being haunted by what he does. “It is a reward, at the end of the day.”

Does the sight of this word offend you? Did it take you aback to see it as the title of my first “proper” blog post? It’s not your fault. It’s not really anyone’s fault. I could say that society has stigmatised suicide. But, don’t we make up society? Who would I be scapegoating if I were to lump all the blame on them? I think we are the proverbial them.

I wanted my first blog post to be light, witty, controversial, maybe slightly offensive… All the things that I am when I’m chatting with my friends. I wanted to slide slowly into the bloggersphere. Dip my toe in the water before I ducked my head completely under. That’s the kind of person I generally am, I test the waters before I take the plunge. But enough swimming analogies, I’m sure my journalism tutors would blanch reading them. “Bad journalism. Have I taught you nothing in five years?”.

Last Saturday, I attended the Out of the Shadows walk in Perth, Western Australia. Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, & Thursday is R U OKAY? Day. This week has been emotionally draining & I just glanced at my phone to realise it’s only fucking Tuesday. I’m really tired. I’m sure there are so, so many people out there who share my sentiments. I KNOW there are. I know them personally. I know too many of them personally. & I watch others from the spectator stand of ‘loose acquaintance’ struggle with the same thing. For all my passion & support of suicide awareness, I must admit hypocrisy. Awareness of suicide is so important. 400,000 people think about taking their own lives each year, the ABC tweeted this morning. Yet, do I talk about it? No. I told everyone that it’s okay to talk about suicide today on my Facebook. I mean it, I truly do. IT IS OKAY. & this dialogue needs to be started. But will I sit down & talk to someone about suicide today? Most likely not. I find it overwhelmingly hard. It is the elephant in the room everywhere I go, for it is something I carry with me every nanosecond of every waking moment of my life. I promised honesty, & holy shit I’ve just gone straight to the deep end.

When I was seventeen, I met a boy. I fell in love. It went pretty badly. I loved him so much that I HATED HIM. He INFURIATED me. I wanted to smack his fucking face & sometimes I did & then I would beg for forgiveness & ask him never to leave because please god I can’t breathe without you. Needless to say, it did not last. Not because I didn’t want it to but because I couldn’t let myself love someone like that. I had nothing left to give anyone or anything else. It drained me & hurt me deeply. So I found someone else, I busied myself, & I got on with making my first love a painful ex who I pretended to loathe because I would rather you think I hate his guts than you know that I have no idea how to ever not love this kid. More relationships, more breakups, more moving on while pretending I did not give one shit let alone multiple, huge, stinking shits that stained my heart. Then something miraculous happened. I actually fell in love with someone else. Head over heels, all in, make-this-the-rest-of-my-life kind of love. But did the other go away? No. Not really. This is what I think people don’t talk about enough: your first love will be forever. & somehow you have to make ALL the rest of your relationships work too. While having a very special, unattainable part of your heart firmly locked away for someone else. It’s messed up.

Aaron, myself & my mum on holiday in Sydney

While holidaying in Bali with my current partner, my phone was ringing in the safe in our hotel room & I refused to answer it because “international calls are expensive & it’s ME who pays, not you”. No but really, I apparently HAD to answer this call. I don’t remember the finer details from this part of my life, probably because my subconscious blocked it out because there’s only so much heartache you can feel at one time before your chest really does explode, & your aching bones shatter & you just drop dead from sadness. But my first love had decided this place was not somewhere he wanted to be anymore, & I would never, ever, ever see him again in this lifetime.

“But he was your ex. As if you care that much. Didn’t you hate him? You didn’t want to be with him anymore, surely that made it easy for you to deal with”. I could almost hear people’s minds ticking over as they thought these things about me. “WRONG. SO TOTALLY WRONG. YOU COULDN’T BE MORE WRONG!” I shook them violently and screamed in their faces in my imagination. It has split my world apart. That’s the thing about suicide, it affects so many people. It makes the day-to-day a battle, for everyone that ever knew, met, spoke to or loved that person. Whether it was a moment together, a year together, or a lifetime together. When someone commits suicide that indelible print that they left on each person they came into contact with is then marred with pain at the thought that what they had with them is never coming back. Even worse is when you torture yourself with what you would do & say if they were still here.

I feel as though I am babbling, it’s hard to write succinctly about something that has changed your life so much. Let’s talk about suicide. Please speak to someone, because otherwise you leave behind people like me that will miss you so much that the pain is tangible. Daily. Forever.

Is probably what you thought when you clicked on my blog. Right? Insert not-impressed-whatsoever emoticon right about here.

Another blogger. As if the internet needed another girl with a keyboard & a wi-fi connection dubbing her opinions holier than thou & worthy enough of your scarce time.

Me. In case you didn’t know. I went all Katy Perry recently & got purple hair.

Well, let me just go back about 13 years & take you with me. I attended a snobbish, upper middle class private school from the get go. I did prep to year 12 there & never knew anything else. It was MANDATORY to get a laptop in grade 5. I’m talking ‘get-the-fuck-out-you-bum’ kind of mandatory. So I got my first laptop at about age 10. Most of the kids in my class played the Windows pinball that came with it, because back then the internet had to be plugged into your laptop with a cable. That shit was annoying & way too hard for kids our age & it meant that we only went on the internet when our teacher said so. I vividly remember sitting in the car on the way to & from school, not playing pinball, but writing. Writing novels. Writing poems. Writing a diary. I was good at it too. Stay with me here, I was really good at it. My grade four teacher was a published author herself, & when I wrote an illustrated series of children’s books called “Muck” (he was a blob of mud who had eyes & a lightening bolt for a best friend. I was an only child, okay?) she wanted to send them to her publisher.

We never did get them published. Obviously. But I’m blowing my own horn hard & loud because what I’m trying to say is I have always written since I mastered prose to a legible degree. It seems to be something I grew up doing, & I can’t count how many times someone ultra successful says they got to where they are by doing what they believed they were always meant to do, no matter what. 

I suffer from pretty hectic anxiety (blog post to come) & so right now my head is spinning, I feel nauseous & my heart is beating like I just double dropped some heavy MDMA caps (maybe a blog post to come on this, too). I’m scared. Really scared. But I’ve nearly finished my degree with a journalism major. And I love to write. And I have opinions. Heaps of them. I say things just to spark debate. I like when people get heated, & angry, & most of all when they get so caught up in the argument they start to get real. They peel away their layers & for a moment you can see what makes them tick & what makes them really passionate. What makes them passionate enough to abandon that mask we put on as we take a deep breath & step through our front door every morning. I’ll check my mask at the door every time I come to write a post. I promise.

As for my content: anything & everything. Head to my about page & fill out the form if you have ANYTHING you would like me to write about. I want to hear from you, & I want to write for you.

All-in-all, why did I start this blog? Why am I here?

(Source: www.charlespeters.net. Guy knows his shit apparently)

To work harder, to get real, to do my own thing, & to write.