This summer I was at the grand canyon with my boyfriend. I love it there – it was pure bliss and I couldn’t have been happier. We started off down a trail and ran into a woman who said there was a man sleeping on the trail ahead of us and he had stopped responding to her when she spoke to him. She was nonchalant and said basically “ya know, just in case, I’m gonna run to the top and try to get service and call for help”.....my boyfriend was a corpsmen in the Navy and has a great deal of medical training, but because of the way she put it and the casualness of everyone else we passed, we took our time, breaking out our binoculars to look for birds and then trying to identify them in our bird book, giggling about things, etc, just having a generally good time. When we rounded the bend and saw this mans body face down in the dirt it hit us that this was not a joke or a casual matter, this dude was dying. We tried for 20 minutes to revive him before the rangers got there. He was already gone. His eyes were glossed over when we started though he had a faint heart beat at the beginning. Seeing them put the shiny silver blanket over his body killed me. His kids were there too. They watched him die. All we could think was that if we had run to him, maybe it wouldn’t have been too late. We must have been just minutes too late. Though I’m glad we at least tried, I wish the situation would have gone differently. I feel really bad to this day. The one upside though I’ll say is this: the last thing he saw was literally the most beautiful thing in the world, at least in my opinion. He got lucky in that regard, compared to most people.
But shit, that was a real downer to the grand canyon trip. Everything else I’ve done that I’m not proud of is way too personal to share here, lol.