There is an odd familiarity sometimes when you work in the same area for over a decade.  As you walk through a park you remember the random interactions; with kids, with adults, with criminals, with victims.

You walk past the gazebo that to you, is the place you ran past once trying to find a partner in a foot pursuit who was calling for help on the radio but couldn't say where he was.  To the family approaching it's a nice shady spot to set up homebase for the afternoon at the park.

On a foot patrol behind a building you find freshly laid beauty bark and spiderwebs that are so wrapped up around your hair and face that it's clear nobody has cut through there for a while.  But what you see is the homeless camp that filled this spot two years ago, with dozens of beer cans, cigarette butts, rain smeared cardboard with handwritten pleas for cash, and remnants of a person's life.   

Sometimes it's a dirty feeling.  To drive around this beautiful place and know some of its secrets.  To notice the things the other people don't notice.  It used to be titillating but sometimes it's just numbing. 

And sometimes it is just a sad feeling.  To realize not just what you know, but what you've forgotten.  Tonight, driving through a parking lot you've been through periodically through the years, and realizing that this was the lot.  This lot, many years ago, was when you watched someone die.  It was a medical issue, or rather a host of medical issues, from a hard life.  A coworker, concerned about someone sleeping in his car, made a call.  And you got there too late.  And you were by yourself at his car when he looked right at you and you realized there was nothing.  By the time backup and the fire crew were there....they tried, but there was nothing.

The fire crews - first helpful, reassuring that this result was determined long before your arrival.  Then they were frustrated, wanting to leave the scene to get their rig back into service instead of being the resting place for a man who probably hadn't even realized the efforts that took place.  It was hours it felt like, and maybe was, until the medical examiner arrived.  And it wasn't until that morning, climbing into bed, that it hit you.  You watched someone die.

This wasn't talked about.  The bodies were expected.  The injured were expected.  But to take part in that moment, that final moment, that wasn't talked about.  And so years later, you are there at night, driving through the parking lot nonchalantly, until suddenly the memories were there again, and you realized where you were.

And you realized that where you are today is not the same person.  And you never would be the same person.  Because now you're a person that can go for years without thinking of this death until one night some random thought jumps up and you realize the extent of all of these moments that you've seen must be greater than you realized, if this moment can go away for so many years.  And that's ok.  Maybe it's even good.  Because you've also replaced that memory with others.  Better ones.  And you like who you are today, even if sometimes you miss that person long ago. 

But that odd familiarity, it's still there.  And for a while, that parking lot's meaning won't be lost.  You'll probably do some extra area patrols in the coming weeks, and maybe try to make some sense of things.  You won't succeed, but you feel like you owe it to his memory.