I repair morgue fridges. One day a body came in while I was working.

So I wasn't going to post this but here it is.

I'm a refrigerator repair tech. My company makes all kinds of units, including the ones used in funeral homes to store bodies before the burial prep. I repair those too.

At first it creeped me out, not gonna lie. But you gotta eat, so you get used to it.

Anyway. One day I'm up on top of one of the units fixing the machinery in the upper compartment. Standard job, body-free like usual. And then. Ambulance sounds. The door to the morgue room swings open, people murmuring, and they wheel in a body.

First stranger's body I'd ever seen. (My grandpa was the only one before that.) I froze up there on top of the fridge. My senior coworker and I just looked at each other like. yeah we should probably get down.

So we climb down. And now I can actually see him.

He looked around my age. Good-looking guy, short hair, built like someone who'd been doing a sport his whole life. And his face was just... calm. No expression. Not scared, not in pain. Just at rest.

I couldn't stop staring. Curiosity maybe. Or something like pity for someone my age who was just gone.

And then I saw his neck.

There were marks. Dark, bluish-purple. Clear. The kind that tell you immediately how this ended.

I felt a chill go through my whole body.

His face didn't match those marks at ALL. There was no trace of suffering on it. Just total peace. That's what got stuck in my head. I couldn't shake it.

Years pass. I mostly forgot about it.

Then a new coworker joins, my same age, office position. We're just chatting one day and somehow I end up telling this story. And he goes quiet.

Turns out he had a close friend. Few years back, that friend hanged himself. A girl he loved betrayed him and then everything else fell apart on top of that. He said his friend had done judo since he was a kid.

Built guy. Short hair.

I asked which funeral home.

Same one.

I checked the date the body was found and brought in.

Same day I was there fixing that unit.

I just sat with that for a while. The world is so small sometimes.

And that face. That peaceful face with the marks on his neck. I think I finally understood it. Maybe when he made that decision, he wasn't feeling pain anymore. Maybe he felt like he was finally putting down something too heavy to carry.