Been out 5 years, none of the gruesome stuff has ever stuck with me, somehow the lens distances me from the action. But the emotional stuff, that's a different story.
When I first started hanging around newsrooms I was appalled by the gallows humor, how could these people make morbid jokes at the expense of people's loss, tragedies or bad circumstances. It's the way they cope, I realized, and they must have developed a very thick skin to work in this biz. Not me, I'll never become that thick skinned, I vowed.
I'm not naive, I realize the photog who gets the shot of of the guy getting wheeled away with the knife sticking out of his shoulderblades, or the cops blowing away somebody from the bushes, or the burning bodies crawling from the wreckage are probably the guys who'll win the emmys. But I thought, I'll never put myself in a position to benefit in any way from someone else's tragedy. The station benefits from the coverage, and I may be the only guy in the country who got the shot, but that is after all, our jobs. Maybe that's why I never felt anything about seeing the gruesome stuff I saw, I'm only there to document it. And I've never made a tasteless joke about it.
Emotionally? I'm a sap. I laugh and cry in all of the places I'm supposed to in movies, when ET dies, and all the kids cry and the music swells, forget it! Gets me every time.
The one story that has stuck with me all these years later was about a family with a mentally disabled daughter, and I can't remember why now, but their treatment was coming to an end and I don't know exactly what her condition was but she had a very enlarged head, she was, to put it delicately, so striking looking that your mind couldn't quite grasp what you were seeing, and you couldn't take your eyes off of her, or forget her.
The Mom and Dad are on the sofa, the girl between them standing, the Mom is starting to choke up a little as she speaks, Dad distracts the little girl with some sort of finger game they play so she wouldn't notice that Mom was getting sad. Mom says with her voice hitching, "I don't know what we are going to do, God gave her to us for a reason, and I just don't know what we can do anymore!" And breaks into sobs, but - soundlessly, and puts her face into her hands. She never made a sound and the daughter never knew. THAT is what gets me, not the candid, unrestrained expression of emotion, but the attempt to supress it.
As a parent I can barely allow my mind to imagine what I would do if faced with similar circumstance. But they way the girl looked, and the dignified way the mother tried to maintain a brave face, while her emotions were raging, still get me all weepy to this day.
The graphic stuff was never an issue, but for all I know I'm sitting on a time bomb.