By Kevin Hazzard
We all have stories. Mine starts like this: a man is peeking through the half-open door to his hospital room. He’s cagey and impatient, but also embarrassed. He’s probably in pain.
I see him and instantly want to know but lack the courage to ask and, anyway, I don’t know the nurse.
But Shepler has us covered. Massive, imposing, all jingling keys and that tippy-toe walk, he drops his elbows on the table and leans in toward the nurse. Shep is somehow both school girl giddy and stoically calm, equal parts crippling self-consciousness and something that anywhere else you’d call superiority but here, embodied in Shepler, is nothing more than the knowledge that everyone within earshot loves him.
He nods his head toward the man who even now is craning his neck to see what the hold-up is. “All right, boo,” Brian whispers. “What’s the story with that guy?”
This is how it is with Brian Shepler. When his name comes up — as it has time and again since his death, how it certainly will as long as any of us are alive — we don’t discuss him or merely remember or honor him. We imitate him. We tell the story, his story, the one, regardless of how it starts, that always ends in laughter. Everybody has one and when it’s your turn, you’ll stand up, do your best impression and make someone laugh. These stories, they aren’t about the quotidian details. You won’t bring up all the places he lived and worked. Yes, you’ll talk, albeit briefly, about how he was a mentor, a leader, an example of what not only a medic, but also of what a friend should be.
But the somber, the serious, it won’t last. It’s impossible. Because that’s not what you remember. Not really. What you remember is smiling. So much that your face hurts. Laughing and crying and being happy, really happy, and having such a great time that thirteen and a third hours flies by. Always too fast — that’s how I remember my shifts with Shep. And too funny.
Gifted storyteller and caregiver
So yes, you will remember how great he was. And then — pushing yourself up on your toes, jingling your keys, feigning a physical mass and brilliance of being you do not possess — you’ll laugh and say the words: So no shit, this one time …
Tony Trimble was a longtime medic and supervisor at Grady who not only worked with Shepler but was there the day he was hired. Though not particularly big, Tony is famously stern and intimidating, equal parts Wyatt Earp and Jesse James — imagine Yosemite Sam running flash edema with practiced efficiency. Shepler was just the opposite — six and a half feet tall, flamboyantly and unapologetically gay, strong as a bull but gentle as a mouse.
On his first day at Grady, Shepler trotted up to Tony and exclaimed “Oh. My. God! I am so excited to be here.”
Tony rocked back on his heels and said “Holy shit, you’re one tiara shy of being a princess.”
Without even blinking, Shepler said, “Bitch, please. I have a tiara at home.”
Then, as if to prove he was not only unoffendable, but possessed of the famous dark EMS humor, he placed a hand on Tony’s head and told him if he was any shorter, he’d be scary — Shepler’s fear of little people was legendary.
So was born a friendship that lasted nearly two decades. In 2007, when the charter bus carrying the Bluffton men’s baseball team toppled from an overpass on I-75, Shepler and Tony were the first to arrive. Not only did the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief—those unfortunate young men couldn’t have been in better hands, but Tony found himself in awe of the man before him.
As Tony recounted years later, Shepler managed the triage and transport of every patient on-scene, organized incoming and outgoing units, and never let the moment overwhelm him. After that call, which was grisly beyond words, they were offered the rest of the shift off. Both men shook their heads and climbed back in their ambulance. There was work to be done.
Julie Sanders told me a great one. She and Shepler were partners at Grady and, as so often happens in Atlanta, their patient started fighting with the police. The patient was on their stretcher but combative and he took a swing at the cop and we all know how it goes from there. The officer grabbed him, tried to hold him down, to subdue him, but the man was too big, too angry, and it spilled over. The officer yelled for them to call backup and Shepler did the only reasonable thing he could think to do — he leaned right into the middle of the scrum and keyed up the cop’s radio.
A quick chirp and the soft click of the airwaves being invaded. Then silence. Shepler was choosing his words. Then he cleared his throat and crooned in that gruff, princess voice of his, “Uh, ummmm, hellloooooo? APD to radio?”
The dispatcher came back over the air, confused. “Go ahead?”"
Brian, still leaning over the fight, still dangling from the cop’s shoulder mic, said “Um, yeah. We’re going to need some back up.”
The dispatcher, stern and prompt, at full command of the business end of the city’s considerable communications network, demanded to know where the officer was.
Shepler blinked. His mouth was inches from the cop’s ear, his body suspended above the ongoing fight by half an arm’s length. The open mic breathed grunts and curses, the squeak of a leather duty belt. Ever matter of fact, Shepler shrugged. “He’s right here, wrestling with the patient on my stretcher.”
The fight intensified and Shepler — equal parts queen and brute — no doubt weighed in with a wild elbow or two, before shouting “OH MY GOD, CAN YOU PLEASE JUST SEND BACK UP?”
Three full seconds of silence settled over the entirety of APD communications.
An officer’s distress call brings the full fury of hell, but on that day it also brought confusion and the vague notion that someone or something from a place far far away, invaded their otherwise stoic world.
Questions without answers
These stories never end. That he described himself as a black woman in a white man’s body. That he had endless patience for new medics but zero patience for OB calls. That he was dispatched to the traumatic arrest of one of Grady EMS’s most infamous patients — an unapologetic former pimp who’d had multiple strokes and routinely verbally and physically assaulted every medic who transported him — and that he got a save. That he threw wild parties during the Miss America Pageant that probably shouldn’t be described here. That he was terrified of dolls and clowns and, yes, little people. That he loved animals and was an ardent supporter of no-kill shelters.
As for my own Shepler story. The one that starts with an angry man peeking out from behind a hospital room door.
Turns out that man was part of that special club, the one whose members experiment with the rectal insertion of household items only to lose their grip — and their household item. When Shepler heard the news, he shrugged and grabbed his clipboard. “That’ll teach him,” he said. “Gotta have something to hold onto.”
Since Shepler’s death we’ve told these stories — to ourselves, to each other, to people who never met him and are worse off for it. Underneath it all, of course, lay questions with no answers. Why? Why should such a good man, who gave us all so much love, who made us laugh — my God, how he twisted himself in knots to make us laugh — why have we been robbed of his light? Was it part of some cosmic plan, was it purely a freak accident, was it so his joy could transcend that single body and inhabit all of us?
Having crossed over to what comes next, Shepler knows. So, too, he knows what the point is.
The rest of us, however, are left to wrestle with the inexplicable. Our friend Tony Trimble summed it up best: “Lives were saved and a difference was made by the presence of a single man. That, my friend, is enough for me.”
Indeed.
And Shepler, being the dedicated Buddhist he was, no doubt would approve of such a sentiment. Then he’d gather himself up and, with a jingle of keys and a tippy-toe walk, he’d slip out of the room. “Come on,” he’d say, “let’s go to Bankhead Fish. Mama’s hungry.”
About the author
Kevin Hazzard worked as a paramedic from 2004 to 2013, primarily at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. His freelance journalism has appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Marietta Daily Journal, Creative Loafing, and Paste. He is the author of two books. “Sleeping Dogs,” a novel, and “A Thousand Naked Strangers: a paramedic’s wild ride to the edge and back” about his years working in Atlanta. He and his family live in Hermosa Beach, California.