Free Desolate Angel by Chaz McGee

so bright in the sky, clouds so pure, air so clean. It was the best of winter, a gift to the living. Yet here I was, the dead, enjoying it more than anyone. It was enough to make me feel alive. That had been happening to me more and more over the last month. I had come to notice the beauty of the physical world, the times when it left behind human misery and struck out on its own to prove that this was still a generous planet, one that was far too bountiful and forgiving for the likes of human beings.
    Maggie stopped at a neatly maintained duplex near the entrance. It was painted slate gray and rimmed with beds of winter foliage that bloomed with a hardiness that mystified me. After a moment, the door opened and Morty, the beat cop I had disparaged for so many years because of his apparent lack of ambition and his willingness to walk the same neighborhood his entire career, came down the steps wearing his full dress uniform, right down to a pristine shine on his shoes. He was dignity personified. His white hair gleamed against the deep blue of his hat. He looked more like a chief than a street cop.
    He knew Maggie well. “Hello, Rosy,” he said as he climbed inside her car. “Need me again, do you?”
    Maggie’s smile was sad. “I think she may have been all this lady had. I couldn’t bear to go it alone.”
    Morty touched the brim of his hat. “That’s what I’m here for. You break the news; I know you see it as your job, but you can leave the rest to me.”
    “I bet you thought this part of your job was over once Dad retired,” Maggie said as she headed out for the bypass that encircled our town.
    Morty shook his head. “This is one part of my job I know will never be over. At least not until it’s me they’re notifying someone about.”
    “You have a family?” Maggie asked, a little startled, as if it had never occurred to her.
    “A brother out in California. He has a family of his own. I haven’t seen him in years. Not quite sure why. Seems like every passing day pulls us further apart.”
    “It happens that way sometimes,” Maggie admitted, as if she were thinking of the people in her own life who had drifted away from her for no real reason.
    “It does.”
    They rode in an easy silence I envied, having never reached that point of comfort with anyone, not even my wife. I was always getting berated for something, or apologizing for a transgression, and there had been no time for this sort of peace. But I had slithered out of facing my failings with the skill of a jackal, so how could I blame those who had disgorged their disappointment on me when they had me pinned down?
    The mother of the dead girl lived in a two-story clap-board house that was too large for a person living alone. She had been unable to leave after her daughter left for college, I guessed, perhaps unwilling to abandon the memories that the house held. Oh, but she would likely leave after today. This would not be a memory to cherish.
    As I trailed Maggie and Morty up the long walkway, I knew I was about to witness the tipping point in another human being’s life, that very moment at which they gave up on living and decided to wait it out until the end. To lose a child could not be easy; it was not the way of the world. Had I been paying attention in the past, I might have absorbed the magnitude of it before. Certainly I had delivered this kind of news to parents more than once. But all those notifications of next of kin, delivered according to some script Danny and I had been given in the academy a good twenty years before, had blurred into a single uncomfortable sense of aversion and left little impression on my soul.
    This one would be different. I would be seeing the destruction of a human heart, the loss of all of its hopes and endearments, from a place close to inside that heart. I resolved to see it, to remember it, to learn from it. I would make up for what I had missed the first time around.
    The enormity of the suffering that