GRT

it's not like i didn't know he was sick, or how severe the diagnosis was. he told us about it a year ago, and who knows how long he dealt with it before he shared his news. multiple brain tumors aren't really the kind of thing you can just bounce back from. even so, it was still unsettling seeing him laying in the casket. i say unsettling as if being bothered by seeing someone dead in a casket before you is somehow out of the norm. like his death was really all that different from anyone else's. all deaths are unsettling, all deaths are hard to wrap your mind around. it was just strange seeing the person who helped us deal with so many other deaths now no longer around to try and help me come to terms with this latest one, with his. it started with my grandmother's fifteen years ago and followed from there, my grandpa's, two uncle's, and then my dad's. i guess for some reason, to me, he always seemed immune to the fate that waiting for everyone. he was brave, he was fearless, and to him dying just meant the start of something else, not an ending. i guess that's why i was always both intrigued and freaked out by him, death never has been something i could ever comprehend myself being okay with. but there he was, or at least this version of him. i've seen a lot of dead bodies in 31 years, more than i really care to think about. the one thing they all have in common is how unlike the living version of the person i used to know they wind up becoming. they don't look like they're sleeping, peaceful, at rest... they look like a fake version of the person i knew, i loved. an imposter, a stand-in. and he wasn't an exception. people always say funerals are a chance to say goodbye, but i sometimes wish it was a tradition we just didn't have. it's hard to shake the mental image of the person you know and love lying in a casket, dressed up in clothes they didn't pick out, surrounded by flowers. and the last glimpse you have of them is this unnatural state of being that just doesn't sit well with you. at least it doesn't with me.