Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq
By: Jessica Goodell, John Hearn / Narrated By: Emily Durante
Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
In Memoriam for the fallen, but this woman is one Veteran to remember
Jessica Goodell, a Marine, volunteered to serve in Mortuary Affairs in Iraq, and it changed her life in horrific ways. There she learned how to document the remains of fallen servicemen and women. On a drawing of a human form, one entered where bullet wounds went, and if limbs or heads were missing, those areas on the drawing were shaded black.
And during her time in Mortuary Affairs, she didn’t know it, but huge chunks of her life, her spirit, were shaded black. She stopped seeing others as people and started seeing them as corpses she would have to process. She’d see them as only so much mushy flesh she’d have to scoop out of an IED hole. She’d look at a napkin carelessly stuffed in a pocket after use, and she’d see it as something she would have to document to be sent home to grieving family members who might attach extraordinary significance to it, perhaps thinking that ketchup on it was actually blood. She couldn’t eat because everything smelled like burnt and decaying flesh.
Shade it Black is a truly awesome audiobook and Goodell’s words and imagery are so very haunting. She enlisted right out of high school and took that innocence with her into a world of gore and death. The way it’s written, the listener feels as sucker-punched as she was, already lonely as a female Marine is never seen as anything but a human mattress, as a Mortuary Affairs worker is never seen as anything but bad luck. She numbs out, she does whatever she has to do to survive just one corpse at a time.
But the book isn’t all about Iraq. It’s about a shaded black life back in the States, a life devoid of hope, devoid of feeling. Jess doesn’t know how to live after all she’s seen and done. She misses the loyalty and honor of the Marine Corps, can’t seem to find it in the civilian world where there are too many choices, and too few people who know how hard just breathing can be. She chooses a life with a violent man who refuses to see that she has PTSD as much as he does from the war. Indeed, this is about as good a book as any I’ve read/listened to in chronicling a decline due to PTSD.
Sometimes Emily Durante doesn’t do the words justice as the first part of the book is soooo emotionally powerful and her tones are rather low-key and flat. But she definitely narrates the second part perfectly as Goodell is about as numb and blunted as it gets. Durante still has some roughness in her voice that suggests struggling emotions, but there’s a detached spaciness that makes you feel like you’re listening to someone who’d really like to just be dead.
I almost chose Shade it Black as my pick for our audiobook club, but my sister and my mom weren’t in the mood for anything too heavy… Well, this definitely is a heavy, heavy listen, so there’s that. Ultimately, however, it’s about trying to find light in darkness, trying to find life and hope where none is perceived for the moment. And you wind up just wishing the best for Jessica Goodell because she’s such a strong woman, and through it all, she maintains a loving heart.
Quite a feat, all things considered.
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