I have only seen one man die in my life. I had seen him only minutes before full of life. This is how it happened.
When I was working in Cincinnati, we had a rare weekend free. We had arranged for some spiritual directions on the north side of town, however at the last moment all but one man cancelled. It’s a long drive, I thought, and we could probably see him some other time soon. However, we still went up and met him at a Panera Bread.
Driving back on I-75 went at a reasonable click. I saw two guys on motorcycles fly by, their bomber jackets flapping in the wind as they drove between the lanes of traffic. A little while later traffic stopped. Everyone had to merge into the left lane. As soon as we came around the stopped cars in the other lanes, we saw a man lying in the right lane with a lot of blood. He looked bad; his bike was 50 yards further down the highway in the ditch and I doubt he had an open-casket funeral.
Father yelled at me to pull over, he jumped out before I even fully stopped, and ran over to the man. He was still twitching a little. Father gave him anointing. One more twitch. Then, no other movement was seen. I was frozen – my first aid classes told me not to move spinal cord injuries and to give CPR; I had no idea which one to do. I grabbed some white shirts from the car thinking they could clean up the blood or serve as a CPR filter. In the end I draped them over him and they were taken away with him in the ambulance.
One of the closer eyewitnesses told us that he had clipped the big mirror on a semi and lost control of his bike. Then he was thrown around like a rag doll.
We tried to call the police the next day so we could inform the family that he was anointed but all we discovered was he was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. The lesson for me however, was providence: if we had stayed home or tallied a little talking with our friend after spiritual direction at Panera, this man would have died without the sacraments.
