When death walks by

Death walked down a busy street in Santa Monica a few days ago and met Chuck Morrell coming the other way. It caught his gaze for a moment and appeared as though it were about to speak, but then vanished in silence and waited to claim its own. Morrell hasn’t been the same since.

The incident occurred on Santa Monica Boulevard between 19th and 20th streets, just after the noon hour. Morrell, a glowingly healthy 68, had just come from a routine physical examination and was walking toward his car on a day filled with sunshine. The exam had gone well. All of his tests were normal. He was feeling good.

Coming from the other direction was a stranger who appeared to be about Morrell’s age, striding along as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Morrell is the kind of guy who talks to everyone, and he greeted the man with a friendly “hi” and a nod when they were about 5 feet apart. Instead of responding, the stranger fell silently to the sidewalk.

“There was no clutching his chest and no doubling over in pain the way you’d expect a heart attack victim to react,” Morrell said later, still stunned by the event. “He just keeled over backward, like a tree falling.”

For a moment, Morrell thought it might be a joke, the act of a street performer who would pop up again with his hat out, asking for money. But listening to the gasping sounds of the man lying on the sidewalk, he quickly realized it was real. Death was in the neighborhood.

Using his cell phone, Morrell called 911 and a recorded voice told him all the lines were busy. He was put on hold. Meanwhile, others who had witnessed the incident came rushing over. A man from a nearby office began administering CPR. Another ran to St. John’s Hospital just a block and a half away but was told that the matter had to be handled through 911.

Twelve minutes passed before an emergency operator responded and the incident was reported. Paramedics, based just around the corner, were there in less than two minutes. For much of the 12 minutes, Morrell says, the man was alive and gasping. By the time help arrived, he was in full cardiac arrest.

It was Morrell’s first encounter with sudden death. Days later, he wanted to talk about two thoughts that kept trailing through his head like drifters on a dark road. One was the abrupt realization of his own mortality, the other his inability to reach 911 in time to possibly save a stranger’s life.

“At my age, I know death can be around the corner,” he said in obvious anguish. “But you always figure there’s a chance that if you got help quickly enough, you could be saved. But now I know better.”

Not the kind of man who is haunted by life’s misgivings, Morrell still finds it difficult to come to grips with the nature of the 12 minutes that encompassed a stranger’s final moments. “There was such a feeling of helplessness,” he said. “We were so close to everything! So near to the hospital and so near to the paramedics. Had I only been able to get through to 911 ... “ He let the sentence trail off into silence.

There is indeed something wrong with the system. It’s clogged. Last year there were 7.2 million 911 calls made in California from cellular phones alone, and nearly half of them had nothing to do with real emergencies. Callers were reporting lost dogs or were asking for directions or were complaining about being overcharged by cabdrivers or wanted help with noisy neighbors or were just lonely and wanted someone to talk to.

Nuisance calls, more than simply irritants, can fill the minutes that separate life from death. It is uncertain whether such a delay was caused by unnecessary calls when Morrell was trying to get through. But he can’t help wondering, would that man, the stranger, be alive had someone immediately answered his call?

He thinks about it as he rises at 5:30 in the morning for a brisk walk near his Palm Desert home. He had quit taking walks for a while, but he’s back at it again, after that terrible incident on Santa Monica Boulevard. And he’s back practicing yoga too.

The man who died on that city street was 82. Death is never far away in one’s eighth decade of life, and going quickly isn’t that bad. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson said it gently: “God’s finger touched him and he slept.” No heavy pain, no long goodbyes.

But witnessing unexpected death is something else. I suspect that for years, Chuck Morrell will see the look on the dying man’s face and wonder at the words that were never said. And he will similarly always hear the ticking of a 12-minute clock and ponder the existence of a stranger’s life within the embrace of its passing seconds.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.