Bummed.
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Right away my own mortality became evident. I was no longer the youth immortal. Things that were once thrilling became pointless: homework and math were always pointless but popularity and school dances or activites seemed pointless, too. I wrote poems, plays and short stories about this death, became a bit obsessed with death...not like a goth but like that neurotic Woody Allen...I even had an older friend who reminded me a lot of Woody Allen, who was an official professional writer and he would get stoned as he wrote and we would talk about life or lack of life together until one day he turned to me and reccomended therapy (some thing he would never usually recommend.) My twenties progressed, (survived my teens some how) more people passed along as we all will, I looked at my inevitability and decided that the answer was some where in the "tropic's of cancer" which basically meant, be as lushy as one can, drink as much wine eat decadent food and fall in love often...but then I got lost on that road and ended up very confused so I do not recommend desire as an answer to end. It's boring and more people tend to die around an experience junkie then the company kept in say, a yoga class. (mental note for reference in passing relationships in addition.) So running was not the answer to death or even big changes. Near mid twenties. Acceptance. I hate to be a quoter but Tom Robbins just captures it brilliantly in his novel: "fierce invalids home from hot climates": "Accept that your a pimple on the ass end of creation," (which if the world keeps destroying the earth face it folks, we are, we are.) but my favorite quote is by Echart Tolle, and he says this: (and I follow my heroes on how to handle death these days since god knows my best thinking get's me closer to it then I would like to admit) "I am not clairvoyant but I can tell you that all of you will be walking around for a few more years and then you will be dead." So enjoy life accepting endings and death by appreciating it with gratitude, humble acceptance because it is all apart of nature, it is all what is and the moment we see a dead body and think that that is not apart of our reading rainbow conditioning, fuck it. it comes with the world people. It is every where and of us: love and loss. I've seen dead bodies. Nothing like seeing a person walking around dead inside for fear of end.
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It was my lack of reaction. It wasn't as scarey or as upsetting as I thought it would be......
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Sadness.
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I actually saw a number of dead bodies on Saturday. It was pretty neat.
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I've seen a good number, both laid out on purpose or suddenly there, and have had many reactions. Now I see a corpse as an empty vessel from which the magic has dissipated and wish more people would allow the harvesting of their own.
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It was a little glimpse into the emptiness of everything. At one time that body was totally animated, living a life filled with activities, loved ones, emotions, the pain and joy of experiencing life, and now it's... nothing. Sad for the life it lived, but also, whatever animated that body is just no longer there. It just is what it is. Same with anything else we experience - whatever we put into it is what animates it. So without whatever anger or depression or grasping we experience in a situation, it just is what it is. Trippy.
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When my mother passed, I noticed that her fear and anxiety were no longer expressed in her face. She was free at last from her torturer. I felt such a sense of relief myself.
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Bye Mom.
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Yes. a few timez. everythng frm sexaul thngz kind fresh n 0ld az durt 2 cleanin at nursein h0me.
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In African-American Culture open casket funerals are the norm so growing up whenever we went to a funeral we had to do the whole "viewing of the body" thing. The first time I think it was my great uncle's funeral. i remember noting that it looked like a slightly grayer, slack-cheeked, waxy version of himself.
Last year when a younger very close friend of mine died they had decided on an open casket. His mom called me the moring of and told me that she really didn't want to have the casket open at all. She warned me to brace myself because he didn't look like the handsome man that he was at all. I decided not to do the viewing thing because it was too hard. I caught a glimpse before they closed the casket. I'm still sorry I looked.
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My mother and I had been keeping watch over my father in the hospital for days. I wanted to make sure that he was not alone when he died, but with just the two of us taking regular shifts it was hard to make sure there was someone with him round the clock.
He left one morning on Mother's Day at around six a.m. when no one was there. I drove over to Calvary in the Bronx at around eight o'clock. When I entered the room it was obvious that he was already long gone, there was clearly no longer any spirit residing in that body. But I was surprised at how beautiful he looked, and how strange and different his body was with no life in it. His eyes were closed and his face was frozen in whatever that last moment had been for him. There was something seemed strong and regal about the body in that bed. There was a profound sense of stillness. This vessel that had served him reasonably well for most of his sixty-three years looked like some beautiful shell that had been left behind; an elaborate cocoon, or some alien spaceship he had been driving around in, now abandoned since it was no longer needed. The sight of it filled me with awe and felt sacred.
The funeral home talked us into embalming him, which in retrospect was a silly thing to do for a closed casket funeral. At the service my mother and I viewed his body one last time. His face was caked up in an effort to make him seem more familiar to us, but it looked pointlessly artificial. He was wearing a fine suit I had never remembered seeing him in, but his body looked small and crumpled in the casket. They had gone to great lengths to make him appear as if he was still just like us, but the result only served to confuse. What I had previously seen that morning in the hospital bed had told me he that he was truly departed, and that something mysterious, natural and maybe even wonderful had happened. Remembering the beauty of that unaltered body brings me far more comfort today.
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Devastation. He was a senior in my high school and died in a car accident. It was an open casket. I regretted looking at him because I wanted to remember him as vibrant...his body looked nothing like him...
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I used to work in an emergency room, and my mother was a hospice nurse when I was growing up, and I work a lot with sick/dying animals, so I have seen more than my fair share of dead beings. One thing that always strikes me is how limp they are (at first), how like a deflated balloon. It's like life is almost literally what inflates them. The second thing is what a shell the physical body is. It really is just a container for the soul. To me, the body doesn't even look the same after death, it's just a husk.
I know it sounds weird, but I always feel a sense of relief - most of the dead creatures/humans I see were suffering very much before they passed, and I feel this relief that they don't have to be in physical pain anymore. I feel very compassionate towards the dead, and I hope that after leaving their bodies they are off to a more wonderful adventure. The physical remains don't distress me, it's just what's left behind. Discarded luggage not needed on the trip of a lifetime.
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Deep sadness. I was in my 20s when I saw my grandmother in her casket, and in my 60s when I saw my mother prior to her cremation. It was difficult losing both of these women who had such influence in my life. My grandmother looked healthier than she had in a long time due to the cosmetics work done by the mortuary. My mother looked much more "normal" because she was not made-up prior to being cremated (she seldom wore make-up). I realized in both cases that what made these women who they were was no longer there with them. Their bodies were empty shells.
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Post Mortem, September 12th 2003
Skin gone cold and white goes smooth.
That surprised me, how smooth it became.
What had been creased with ruts of time
became smooth as highly polished stone,
almost translucent, but where blood pooled.
The nature of water, this guise of gravity:
on hip and shoulder, elbow and knee bruises
blossomed like tentacles of purple anemone.
And the skin became as frigid as alabaster,
but not so rigid, even after rigor, that age
long before the flesh drips from the bone.
Never I had been this close to death before.
Never before had I held it by its new glove
and called it by the name of one I loved.
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'then why did you ask?'
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I've seen too many dead bodies to count. My first one would have been my grandmother in her coffin. I was pretty shocked and numb when I saw her. The next was a woman's body that was being used for a human dissection class. That one was much more disturbing. I remember dissecting her hands and examining the tendons in there, then going home and freaking out in the shower, thinking about what lies beneath my skin as I ran the washcloth over my arms. I didn't like how disturbed I felt, so I stopped going to the class. Now, when I see dead bodies (that I'm no longer dissecting), I feel a certain deep inner peace simultaneously to feeling just a wee bit spooked.
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peace, because in this case the end had been peaceful, i was in the room for her last breath, and she was ready, at 80, to move on.
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First dead body I saw (besides in a casket) was my mom. I was 23, she was 46. She had a massive stroke that in a few days left her brain dead. I sat with her when the respirator was turned off and watched her body stop functioning. She was already dead in every other way. Witness that process, that it was clear her spirit had already left and the machines were just sustaining a sack of tissue. I was stunned that there was no sign of struggle. I was sad that I missed seeing her spirit released from this world.
Since then, most of the bodies I have seen were through my work in law enforcement. I took a death investigation course with the county coroner. My main reaction was clinical detachment with a small degree of horror at what a body can be put through. I don't believe life begins or ends with a sack of tissue. That spirit/energy comes from and is released to the Universe and made into somthing else. So, I guess my reaction to seeing death was to free me of the fear of it.
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And mine...
Father: Same things I felt when he was alive.
Person dead on the side of the road last Sunday when I was riding my bike home: Deep grief. I got off my bike to pray for him, but I was really praying for me.
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