My First Dead Body

Today I thought I would write just a quick blurb about … you guessed it… death! I was trying to think of interesting topics when I remembered that I saw my first real dead body just in the last 5 months! That’s pretty interesting; at least I think it is.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, I have been lucky enough to have only one close family member die in my lifetime. He was cremated and there was no formal funeral. Since then, I have been in attendance at two funerals (an old elementary school teacher and a girl I once played volleyball with) but, thankfully, neither of them had open caskets. Unless you count family pets and /or road kill, I had never seen a dead body.

However, just this last November/December, my roommate and I were driving down Quadra after dark; we had just reached the downtown area when we saw someone being wheeled out of an apartment building on a stretcher. We were slowing down to stop at a red light and so it seemed to unfold before us very slowly. The moment I saw the stretcher I began to say, “Oh no, it looks like someone was hurt”, but before the words were even out of my mouth it registered in my mind that the person was in a body bag.

My roommate and I saw it at the same time and our jaws dropped open – it’s a miracle we didn’t rear end the car in front of us. It seemed very surreal since we were so removed from the situation but the feeling stayed with us all night. It makes you think about how our actions, conscious or unconscious, may affect others’ lives. I guarantee you that the man inside the body bag never imagined he would be the topic of this blog entry about “My First Dead Body”.