Death is one of the constants in the ambulance service, but it isn’t a single experience. It doesn’t arrive in one form, and it doesn’t affect you in one way. Over nineteen years, I built a whole set of distinctions to make sense of it — adult death against a child’s, sudden against expected, a peaceful house against a violent one. I thought I’d mapped every version of it that mattered. Two weeks ago, I found out there was a bigger one I’d never properly reckoned with.
Adult death, most of it, becomes something you learn to manage within a framework. You arrive, you assess, you confirm, and you follow the process. You deal with the family, the environment and the documentation, and a professional distance carries you through it — not because you don’t care, but because you’ve learned how to function in that space. Children break that framework every time, no matter how many years you’ve done the job. That distinction is real, and it’s probably the one most people outside this work assume is the whole story.
But there’s another distinction underneath it, and it took losing my own mother to understand how deep it runs. It has nothing to do with the age of the person dying. It’s about whether that person is a stranger or someone you love. I’ve stood in more rooms than I can count where a stranger has died, and I’ve carried every one of them steadily because it was never mine to carry in quite the same way. I’ve lost people close to me during these nineteen years too, and each time I’ve carried the loss differently, depending on what I already knew about death when it happened. Losing my mother was the deepest test of that distinction yet.
My mother had a fall at home, and my wife found her. She’d fractured her pelvis, and her lungs — already fighting years of interstitial lung disease — didn’t have much left to give. The ambulance crew that came to her that day included a close friend of mine, someone who treated her himself and took her to the hospital. I’m more grateful to him than I’ve been able to properly say since, and I’m glad, without reservation, that it was him. In the emergency department she seemed to be holding her own, well enough that nobody so much as raised the possibility of where this would end. She was transferred to a ward for further assessment and treatment.
Two days later, I was at another hospital, dropping off a patient of my own. By the time I checked my phone, there were missed calls from an unknown number with no message left behind. It was the ward trying to reach me. I called back and was told to come now.
I remember getting there, having to take a detour because of roadworks on the motorway. I remember having the eerily strange feeling that settled in on the way. My mother had a DNACPR in place, and some parts of me, trained by years of doing exactly this job for other families, already knew what that meant if she’d deteriorated enough to need it. I’ve delivered that news to enough people myself, in places that looked exactly like the one I was about to walk into, to recognise the shape of it coming for me.
My wife and I reached the ward within seconds of each other — her stepping out of the lift, me walking down the corridor from the other direction, as if my mother didn’t want either of us going in alone. Neither of us had planned it that way. It simply happened.
The ward sister spotted us and said the words that filled me with impending doom, “Can I have a chat with you in the office?” I didn’t sit down. I was still turning on my heel as she closed the door behind my wife, and before she could find her own words, I said first: “You’re going to tell me my mother’s dead, aren’t you?” It came out harder than I meant it to. She looked taken aback, then said, “Yes. I’m sorry — she has died.” She told us they’d found her with agonal breathing and that she’d gone a few minutes later.
There were questions, but we wanted answers. My mother had rung my wife less than an hour before she died, sounding well enough to tell my wife to come up early and speak to the doctor. That call sits at the centre of everything that followed. I don’t have an answer for the space between it and the office door. I’m not sure I ever will.
My wife and I both broke down in that office. Then I did the thing the job has taught me to do without deciding to do it — I composed myself and went in to see her. It’s the same composure I use for every family I’ve ever stood in front of on a bad call. I didn’t know until that moment that I could turn it on myself, in the middle of losing my own mother, and still have it hold. It was held. I’m not sure it should have happened to me.
Going in to see her afterwards was its own kind of dislocation. I have stood over more bodies than I could count in this job, and I know exactly what to look for, exactly how the stillness reads clinically. None of that professional fluency helped me in that room. She was my mother, not a patient, and the two things wouldn’t sit together no matter how hard I tried to make them. I stood there as both at once — the paramedic who understood precisely what he was looking at and the son who had just lost his mother — and neither version of me knew what to do with the other.
A doctor came in not long after and walked us through it in the same measured tone I’ve used myself in a hundred rooms just like that one — what led up to it, what they’d tried, the exact minute it happened. I recognised every beat, because I’ve delivered that same script more times than I can count, standing in doorways just like it, watching families take it the way I was taking it now. The facts were the same shape I always use to protect a family from the worst of the truth without hiding it from them — soft enough at the edges to let understanding in gently. This time the softening didn’t reach me. I heard every word as information, exact and complete, and none of it as comfort. I understood something in that room I’d never seen from this side before: the spiel isn’t built to comfort the person receiving it. It’s built to let the person giving it keep doing their job and still walk out able to function.
I was still on active duty through all of this. From the side room, before I’d even left the ward, I phoned my crewmate to tell him my mother had died. He’d been waiting by the ambulance the whole time, parked out the back of the hospital, not knowing which way it had gone until I rang. I called my controller myself as well, though by then he already knew exactly where I’d been heading and why. When I finally walked back out, my crewmate was still standing exactly where I’d left him.
We sat in the ambulance for a minute. Then we headed back to the station. Drugs still had to be returned, and kit bags put back onto a shelf, because that’s what the job asks of you, even on the day it’s the death of your own mother.
Once I was away from the hospital, I had to start making calls of my own, telling family before they heard it any other way. Some were harder than others. My daughters took it hardest, with no medical grounding to hold onto and no way to make sense of how someone could seem stable one day and be gone so quickly the next. Then came the rest of the family — the same sentence, over and over, to someone new each time.
Breaking bad news over the phone is its own cruelty, and I’d never fully appreciated that until I was the one doing it about my own mother. You can’t see a face or read a body the way you can in a room. You only get the voice, and you can’t reach through a phone line to hold somebody in the moment they need to hold most. Some of the calls that day were from my mother’s own phone, and more than once whoever answered said, “Hello, Yvonne,” before I could get a word out, expecting her voice and getting mine instead, with the reason for the call still to come.
Hearing someone break down at the other end of a line isn’t the same as watching it happen in front of you. It isn’t less. It’s just different, and it costs you the one thing that can sometimes help most in that moment — the ability to put your arms around somebody and simply be there, when nothing you can say will do what a hug can.
And then there are the smaller losses that suddenly attach themselves to the larger one. My mother was the biggest supporter we had for the new kitchen we were getting fitted in at our own house. She was meant to be the first person through the door to see it finished — something she’ll never get the chance to do now, except perhaps from somewhere above. My wife and I were twenty-five years married last Tuesday. We’d already decided, before Mum fell, that even a week away to mark it properly would have been too much while she still needed looking after. We stayed instead. Then the fall happened, and everything after it happened, and the anniversary we’re not celebrating sits inside the larger loss like a small, quiet one of its own.
We stayed at her house through all of it. The builder put our kitchen job back a week without hesitation, and this small kindness mattered more than he probably knew. During my mother’s wake, her house felt, at times, as though it couldn’t hold any more visitors, and the sympathy cards kept arriving faster than we could open them. The days went past in a blur I still can’t fully account for, from the day we brought her home to the day of the cremation.
She was my biggest supporter for writing too. She’d wanted me to put my experiences into a book for years, and she understood, better than most, why I never quite managed it. But she read what I had published, and she was proud of it, in the plain, unshowy way she was proud of most things I did.
That’s part of why this piece is what it is. It’s as much a reckoning with what all those years of strangers’ deaths and loved ones’ deaths have taught me as it is a tribute to her and to the part she played in all of it simply by being there.
Writing her eulogy forced me to reckon with how much loss she’d already carried herself before any of this. She lost my father in 2001, after thirty years married to him. She lost my sister Tracey in 2024 after a long illness — the loss of a child, which nobody should ever have to carry. She lost her partner, Edward, last year, after nursing him through a long illness of his own. By the time it came to her, she had already shown me, more than once, what it looks like to carry something impossible and keep going anyway. I didn’t fully understand what I’d been asking of her, watching her do that, until I had to do it myself.
My father’s death came before I ever joined the ambulance service, so that grief was entirely mine, without any professional framework underneath it. My sister died after I’d spent years in the job, and I carried that loss differently again. Now my mother. Three deaths of people I loved. Three different versions of carrying it, each shaped in some way by how much of this job I’d already lived through when it happened.
She was cremated last Friday. I gave the eulogy, and I still don’t fully know how I found the strength to stand up and get through it. Family came. Friends came. Former colleagues came, despite her having been retired for three years. Standing at the front of that room, I understood something differently. I understood what it costs for the person doing it. Every family I’ve ever stood with, I now understand a little more about what I was asking them.
A stranger’s death and a loved one’s death are not different merely in degree. They aren’t the same feeling turned up louder. They are different in kind. A stranger’s death, however hard the call, is something I can usually put down at the end of a shift. It was never mine to carry in the first place. It belongs to a family I may have met for twenty minutes and will probably never see again.
My mother’s death doesn’t have an end-of-shift. It’s still here when I wake up. It’s still here at half past three in the afternoon for no reason at all.
With patients, I can often remember the call but eventually lose face. I remember the address, the presentation, the family in the room, and sometimes even the weather that day, but the person can blur into all the others over time. That isn’t callousness. I think it’s how the mind protects you enough to keep doing the job. My mother’s face doesn’t blur. Neither does that hospital ward, that office or that room.
Her death hasn’t handed my routine back either. Simple things stopped working the way they always had — what time I woke up, what I ate, whether I could sit through an evening at home without my mind returning to that office. A stranger’s death can interrupt a shift. A death like this interrupts a life.
I’m on bereavement leave as I write this, which is its own strange experience for someone used to being the person who walks towards this kind of thing rather than the person living inside it. I don’t have the job to put between myself and what’s happened, the way I usually would. There’s no shift to lose myself in, no patient in front of me who needs my full attention instead of my grief. It’s just the thing itself, without anywhere to set it down.
Nineteen years didn’t prepare me for this. Not really. But they weren’t useless either. They gave me the corridor and the office. They gave me the ability to stand upright, hear the words and function in the minutes that mattered. They didn’t touch what came afterwards, once the job of being steady was finally done and there was nothing left to manage but the loss itself.
I’m writing this only two weeks after it happened, sooner than probably makes sense, and I know that. But writing has always been how I put things somewhere I can look at them properly, on the road and off it. I’d rather write this while it’s still raw than wait for a distance that might stifle the truth of it.
I want to put on record how much the people around me have helped these past two weeks — family, friends and colleagues, more than I could list here. My wife most of all. She helped me come to terms with losing my mother while carrying her own version of this at the same time, because losing someone she was so close to also meant reliving what she went through when she lost her own mother. She did that for me while she was still in the middle of it herself, and I don’t think I’ve properly told her what that meant.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one, and I’m not going to pretend to one. Two weeks isn’t enough distance to know how this settles, or whether it settles at all in the way other things have. What I do know now, in a way I only understood in theory before, is that every family I’ve ever stood in front of on the job was carrying something I hadn’t carried myself.
I have now.
I still don’t know what to do with all of it. But I’m still standing, and eventually I’ll go back to the road carrying this the way I’ve learned to carry everything else — not easily, not without cost, but carrying it anyway.
Before this, death belonged to other people’s families. I carried it steadily because it was never mine to carry in quite the same way. I wrote about those years — the rooms, the street outside, and the weight that builds so quietly you almost don’t notice — here: The Room and the Street.
