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{my first dead body} jonathan bitz I saw my first dead body today. And I have no idea how to grieve that moment, that death, that person, that life. I didn’t find him. I didn’t discover his body. But it felt like I did. He wasn’t on the floor. He was in a coffin. He had been dead for days. He was in a funeral parlor. He was my father’s business partner. He had been diagnosed with cancer only three months before. They said he was, most likely, terminal. The doctor said that he’d probably had the cancer for about ten years. It started over Christmas: he went into the emergency room because he was bleeding down below. But even when he was diagnosed, there was something that didn’t seem to completely register with him: he didn’t take his diagnosis fully serious. He kept delaying treatment. I have held-out that he could have known how bad it was and knew that treatment was not going to help. I saw him the week before he died. He was in good spirits, as best as he could. He drank a lot and was prone to weeping about his diagnosis; about the surreality of it all. I told him to be strong. That he needed to be active, now. He shook my hand and smiled kindly at me. That was the last time I saw him, alive. Only two days after he closed on the business – he sold his half of the business to my aunt – he died: Sometime in the afternoon, in his bathroom, on a Sunday. On the following Thursday, I sat at the back of the funeral home, secretly weeping. Quietly crying. Solitarily sobbing. + I have thought about my death and the death of most everybody around me in multiplicitous ways, in nearly every manner I can conceive – in every way that I have ever heard. I’ve thought it all through: the phone call – when it comes, how it sounds, how I will fall over. I’ve obsessed, read, listened to and watched every theory I could about what death means and what the afterlife means – typically this is what we call religion or spirituality. It is a safe and correct observation and memory that I have thought of my death every single day of my life for over twenty, probably thirty, years. Giovanni Falcone made an interesting observation when he said that, “He who doesn't fear death dies only once.” Death is in everything. It’s embedded in every activity I undertake, if in no other way I am constantly asking myself: when I am dead, will anybody even know I did this? Certainly I have asked some stupid questions about my legacy and what it will feel like when I am dead. But there were no dumber questions to be asked than when I was sitting in that funeral parlor, looking at my father’s business partner. I have never seen anybody be so still. I continued, despite several reality-checks, to believe that I would see his folded hands over his belly rise and fall, in breath. Not once – several times this happened. I kept seeing it. I have never seen anybody lay so still… + I would like to publicly state that I do not want to be eulogized in a funeral parlor. I don’t want my parents to be memorialized there either, nor any of the rest of my family for that matter. The particular funeral parlor that I was sitting-in, quietly fighting back tears, was plain. Boxy. In the background, they played country music on a portable player. The whole room reeked with the stuffy, overpowering scent of flowers. The bulk of people were carrying-on in the room behind me: eating food. Laughing. Talking about anything that didn’t involve the fact that one of their beloved ones was dead, laying in a frigid, stale room, by himself. Just feet away… Next to the portable player that cycled through country classics, I stood. Alternating between looking at the posterboards that displayed photos of his life and the real him – the real state of his life and non-life at this point as he laid in a half-opened coffin. The workers in the funeral home answered phones and hustled back and forth, talking with potential clients, trying to get people to buy things like coffins and urns. All the while, there was a dead body laying right out and in the open. What’s worse? There were probably more, behind closed doors, all around me. + We were not taught how to grieve. In fact, I have never really found any good resources to learn about grieving: what it means, how it works, why we do it, and most importantly: why we need to do it. The shaman Martin Prechtel has been the only real resource I’ve found, that – while explaining our deficiencies and ineptitudes in grieving – teaches us how to grieve a little better. Prechtel’s Native American wisdom comes from centuries of practice. If you could hear it, you would understand: the guttural, throaty, desperate tone in his voice when he calls out in grief. In pain. In sadness. It’s shrill. Banshee-like. It’s musical. In Prechtel’s “On Grief and Praise” speech, he shares the insight he learned from a small culture in Guatemala, the Tzutujil. These people, when somebody is sobbing, sloppily staggering down the street – these people don’t turn away: No, they take these people in. They feed them. Care for them. Grieve for what they are grieving for, with them. The name that the Tzutujil gave for those who mourn in public like this is the same noun that they use for a female singer. Prechtel’s idea, as it has been handed-down to him, is that when you grieve, you praise. And we need to grieve well, grieve hard, otherwise you will continue the ancestral pain that you were born into; you will add to it. Multiply it. Increase its power. Grieving, as I understand Prechtel’s paradigm, helps eliminate any future ancestral pain, for future generations. + My father’s business partner was buried in a horrible cemetery, behind a strip mall. I may have been one of the last people to see his face as the fat funeral parlor man closed his casket. We all stood there, around his casket, for a few moments. I wonder what you really do in that moment? What do you say? What is okay to think? I felt as though I were being judged. By whom, I have no idea… but by somebody, something. I’m sure Prechtel would say: grieve. Openly, grieve. But nobody at that funeral was that sophisticated. Everybody hid their sadness behind sunglasses. I saw my father do his best to hold his tears back. I saw his lips quiver a couple of times. I saw him wipe his eyes a couple of times. But I didn’t see a tear. He comes from that old school. That one that is probably not working for us as a people any more, if it ever even put-up a façade that it did. On the drive home my father and I talked about his father’s death and, about his death. My father assured me that, when he dies, he will have felt that he left the best legacy he can. He told me: that’s all you can really do: live your life with the hope that you’ll leave a good legacy, for yourself and for those you leave behind. I finally let it loose, feeling safe at last. I started to heave and sob. My father told me about the ring that he and his siblings put into his father’s hand before they closed the casket. My father said that it took years to get over his father’s death. Nay, he said, you never really get over it. I got a little sloppy, wiped my nose and eyes and then tried to articulate: the day that you die will be the worst day of my life. My father didn’t reply. + “We die only once, and for such a long time.” - Moliere Once, I was waiting in the turn lane, at an intersection. When the car in front of me pulled away, it revealed a squirrel lying below it – it’s bottom-half completely squashed. Its guts, lying-out, below it. But the squirrel was still alive. It was looking up at me. But my light was green, so I didn’t stop. Because really: what the hell do you really do in that situation? Once, I was walking into a university building. I heard a bird fluttering over the top of me – flying from my right to my left. Then: THUD! It crashed into the windows of the building, and flopped to the ground – right in front me. It’s neck was broken. It was twitching on the walkway. Horrified and not sure what to really do, I walked around the bird – looking at it, only stopping to watch the reaction of others that walked past the bird, finding it in its death knell, there on the common ground, the sidewalk. We don’t grieve the death or misfortune of those that are not in our species. No, we just drive by them, while they lay there with their guts splayed-out on the road, a crow pecking at the squirrel’s intestines. |
