So it was a couple of days before I was able to go and see him. The funeral home had given me his clothing from the morgue (I was looking for his wallet and a jacket that were missing from the house, they weren't in there). I learned that death smells the same for all creatures when they gave me his clothes.
I work in an animal hospital. Animals die, they come to us that way sometimes after having been at home for hours. There is a smell. A very particular smell. At work we call it death. Sometimes you can smell it before the animal has even passed. The clothes I was given were full of that smell. I didn't know to expect it, or I wish I hadn't known what it was.
Many people had told me not to go and see his body. My neighbor who had found it said it was horrible and I didn't need that memory. The man who transported his body from my home is friends with one of my coworkers. She had talked to him and he begged her to keep me from seeing him. I had to.
When I was growing up, my grandmother always told me when people died, I needed to go and touch them, see them. She said it would keep me from having bad dreams about them. I have touched every dead body I've seen. I wanted to see him. I wanted my whole mind to understand that he was never coming back. I needed it to be real because everything that had happened had just been so surreal.
I have no idea what the funeral home did to his body. He was so lovely to look at. I had told my mother it was probably going to be scary and gross, because that is what I believed from what I had been told. It wasn't. My sister's and my bff wouldn't let me be there alone, although they did let me go see first, because I asked them to. He looked very much like himself, with his eyes and lips glued shut. They had sprayed him with some sort of strong deodorizer to get rid of the death smell. They had combed and sprayed his hair so wrong, but I fixed that. He was pliable to touch and so cold. Like a sweet day sleeping vampire. I sent one of my sister's to tell my Mom it was ok for her to see... that he wasn't gross or scary. So Mom came in to see. I kissed him and touched him and talked to him. I cried. I told him I was so happy he didn't hurt anymore but that this was really hard and I wasn't happy to be going through all this.
I know it was a body. Not him, but his body, but to touch and know on a cellular level that the life was gone. It did a great deal to help the hole in my heart. Different people need different things for acceptance. I needed the finality of seeing it. Then I did something that I thought only my insane mother did. I took pictures of the body. I took a lot of pictures. Most of them with my bestie's camera which she had in her purse. I took a few with my phone. I thought other's might need to see the body. It was the same concept as the polaroids that my sister n law gave me when I got married (I was married before everyone had a digital camera LOL or a phone that snapped photos to carry around). I enjoyed those photos my whole honeymoon, because they made me realize that yes, I'm married... these made me realize he's gone.
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