The first dead human I ever saw was the dad of one of the kids in my high school band.\u00a0 I remember the kid played percussion, and I think he was one of the Michaels that we referred to as Michael with a last initial.\u00a0 Pretty sure the dad died of a heart attack.\u00a0 Anyway, I went to the viewing with my best friend David, who was also in the band, and as we stood there in line with my middle school band teacher, we had one of those totally inappropriate jokey moments and were all shuddering silently, trying to conceal our laughter.\u00a0 Michael H.(?)’s dad wore a suit and was laid out in a fancy coffin, and I was struck by two things, his stillness and how much he resembled Michael.<\/p>\n
I also went to the viewing of a co-worker’s father in 2004.\u00a0 This was when I was teaching in New York City, and I didn’t even know the guy very well.\u00a0 But he’d always been nice to me and he had given me one of my top three pieces of teaching advice:\u00a0 “If you see a kid doing something wrong, acknowledge the kid who’s doing it right.”\u00a0 The father looked stiff in his tuxedo, clownish in his make-up.\u00a0 Mr. Yount (working in an elementary school, learning first names is optional) seemed truly appreciative that I had come, but I felt uncomfortable and left as quickly as I could without being rude.<\/p>\n
I’ve seen lots of roadkill in my life, including my own pets in childhood, and a few months back, I watched a white cat dash into the road and get hit by a pick-up truck, flipped and torn apart by the tires.\u00a0 That experience gave me some mini-PTSD, I think, as I kept thinking about it for weeks.\u00a0 The image still plays in my mind when I drive down that little stretch of 70.<\/p>\n
(I’m pretty sure I myself ran over a squirrel last year, but I didn’t see it in my rear-view mirror so I prefer to think it escaped and is scampering around Mt. Moriah Road gathering nuts for this winter.)<\/p>\n
And then, of course, there’s Boone.\u00a0 When my brother-in-law took him out of the Animal Control truck, he just seemed heavily asleep.\u00a0 E. put him down on a piece of wood in the driveway.\u00a0 I knelt sobbing and touched my forehead to my dog’s side.\u00a0 When I ran my hands over his chest, I found the bullet holes; my hands came away bloody.\u00a0 His glassy eyes stared, and his tongue hung comically out the side of his mouth like in the cartoons.\u00a0 E. and I dug a hole in my front yard.\u00a0 I lifted Boonie up, carried him to the hole, and laid him in his grave.\u00a0 We mounded the dirt on top of him.\u00a0 The next day I planted a little flower garden there and sank bricks into the ground for a border.\u00a0 I look at that little garden every day.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve just been thinking about this because before Boonie died, I never understood the tradition of viewings.\u00a0 But a few months after his death, I was discussing the concept of acceptance with somebody, and I realized that that’s what seeing, touching, carrying his dead body had done for me.\u00a0 It helped me accept that he was dead.\u00a0 At the time, I wished I could turn back the clock, I played all the what-if games with myself, and six months later, I still cry about it.\u00a0 But he’s dead.\u00a0 He’s dead, and I accept that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first dead human I ever saw was the dad of one of the kids in my high school band.\u00a0 I remember the kid played percussion, and I think he was one of the Michaels that we referred to as Michael with a last initial.\u00a0 Pretty sure the dad died of a heart attack.\u00a0 Anyway, … Continue reading He’s Gone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animules","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}