The Return of Mister Dead

[ornoth]

Death is guaranteed. There are no exceptions. Given that, you’d think it’d be something we’d run into from time to time. Buddhists often seek out the experience of being with a corpse, to fully appreciate the idea that we, like everything else, are impermanent. But in nearly half a century, I’ve never in my life seen a dead human body. Have you? Bodies covered by sheets don’t count.

[Poll #987109]

Comments

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

Are you limiting this to human corpses?

[imperator-mei.livejournal.com]

The first was my grandmother at her funeral, when I was five. The second was a death I witnessed, a heroin overdose at the Frankfurt train station. I saw a lot of close calls there, including stepping off a street car into a pool of blood from a stabbing.

Oh. I'm going to have to change my answer: I've witnessed fatal car accidents, something that's very traumatic to me and I tend to suppress. That adds at least three, maybe more. And again, I've witnessed (and tended to) many potentially deadly injuries at the scene of car wrecks. Plus I pulled a guy off the bottom of a pool who survived, and prevented a man from being beaten to death in the Paris metro (and helped his friends collect his bloody teeth from the floor).

[hyzathra.livejournal.com]

In or out of a funeral home? "In the flesh", or in movies/TV/photographs? Do museum mummies count?

[iniren.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a big difference between just "seeing" a corpse, and "Being with", as you say in your post. People are always surprised when I say that I've never really been near death at all my whole life (very small family, both grandmothers still alive, grandfathers gone before I was born).

But I recently had a very intimate experience with the death of a beloved pet - Kuzia / Pookie the cat. And I actually did sit *with* him for a while soon after he died. And it definitely was a unique experience.