Death is a Weird Thing for Children
(‼️Warning‼️: this story does contain the description of a corpse, and it is described rather callously due to a skewed perception, I mean no disrespect to the deceased in any manner.)
I have few memories of when I was very young, as most kids obviously do, but there are a few that have stuck in my mind for one reason or another. One in particular is a memory from when I was 3, or on the cusp of it, and my parents took me to a funeral.
I vividly remember my dad wearing a suit, my mom wearing black, though I don’t recall what exactly my sister and I were wearing. I vividly remember what the entrance looked like, the layout of the building when we walked inside (it was a small church), and what I was thinking at the time.
I had no idea why we were there. Perhaps my parents had told me where we were going before we left, had explained things, but if they did, I don’t recall that, but I don’t recall getting ready to leave or the drive there either. I highly doubt they did, though, or I likely would have recalled having these thoughts while in the church. Instead, I just remember looking around, seeing all the people talking and greeting each other, and not understanding why we were there.
What I also saw was this weird line congregating at this big box on an elevated platform (which I now know was the open casket on the church stage). People were looking inside of it, and I had no clue what they were looking at. I recall wondering what could be so interesting that everyone was gathering to look, and I simply had to know what was inside this box.
My parents must have been distracted talking to the other adults, because nobody stopped my sister and I (twins, so same age). We waited for people to disperse from the box, because our child brains told us that we had to look when nobody was watching in case we were told no and because we were too small to shove through the crowd of big humans.
Once people were mostly done looking at the box, the stage being almost empty, my sister and I waddled up onto this stage and stepped up this little set of stairs (placed right next to the casket) to grab the edge of the big wood box and lift our chins up to peek inside.
I still remember with clarity what I was thinking of the sight at the time, and how I computed it as a child is still the image it leaves in my head to this day, despite the knowledge of what it truly was as an adult.
I gazed upon this object in a weird box, white and soft-looking on the inside, almost cartoonishly strained on my tippy-toes to catch even just a glimpse of this captivating spectacle that everyone had been gazing and muttering over. So eagerly had I peered in, I was met quickly with disappointment, as the sight was not as exciting as I’d hoped, and also utter confusion, because what was so interesting about this?
It was simply…a thing. I honestly could not comprehend what it was. I stared at it for a long time, thinking perhaps everyone’s interest had not been about excitement but confusion. Perhaps they were so interested because they, too, had no idea what this strange thing in this box was.
It was human-shaped, certainly, that made enough sense, but it was not human. It did not even register as human to me for a moment, and even the description “human-shaped” was a fourth or fifth observation I made when gazing at it. Colored like paper but not, colored weird I knew for sure, dressed up like a doll but underneath the clothes (the skin exposed, though I certainly didn’t compute it as skin) was all wrinkly in a way I thought maybe meant it had been bunched up wrong for too long. Waxy, too (though I didn’t know that word at the time, but I recall making that observation even without understanding the word for it), like a warped piece of dull plastic.
I was so far from recognizing it as a human being that it didn’t even register to me to having any similarity to a mannequin from the mall - it was just this weird thing in a box that made no sense.
It is so interesting to me that, as a young child, I gazed upon a dead body, a once living human being, and recognized that there was no life whatsoever, as though a human-shaped mannequin that had never been alive was more similar to an actual person than a corpse of a woman that had once been alive, like the lack of soul made this person utterly unrecognizable as a human at all.
My lack of knowledge regarding death meant that I had no frame of reference. I still don’t fully understand what it was about the body that made me unable to recognize it as a person, dead or not, just that it was so far out of my understanding that I was only confused. The sight did not scare me, startle me, make me nervous or unsettled - I was just confused, because to me, what I was looking at was something I had never seen before, and I just couldn’t place what it was supposed to be.
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