February 6, 2007

• "Dead Bodies" are on Featured Grownups

  

  
  

  Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, "Dead Bodies" Coming Right At Ya Live From Featured GrownupsSpeedway right outside of Xangatown.

  
  

  
  

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  I could not have created this composite without the images obtainable at the Henninger-Allen Funeral Home, in Enid, Oklahoma ( "A Tradition of Caring Since 1915") Official website: http://www.enidwecare.com/default.asp
  

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  Stephen King wrote a short story called "The Body" which turned into the film "Stand By Me", so the prospect of writing about dead bodies, "dead bodies... it could be about insects, people, water... ohhh all sorts of things!!!!" isn't really as weird as I think it is, but I still think it's pretty weird. Oh well, I promised that I'd write an FG post this time out, so here goes. I proposed two of the five subjects, it might be noted. Dead Bodies got 24 vote, Xanga names, which was mine, was second with 21 votes, and "Uniqueness", also my idea, was last with 9 votes.

  
  

  I see dead people. A short history of the dead in my life.

  
  

  The mortal coil is only so much meat and bones. It only harbors our soul while we're here on Earth, and then our soul leaves our body in it's wake, and the body rots away.
  From dust to dust.
  From ashes to ashes.
  The soul attains perfection, and moves on (or might come back in another guise) becoming Universal. The "body" stays behind, and without a soul, it soon rots. This doesn't stop society from mourning the body, however. From ancient times till a few minutes ago, mankind has elaborately celebrated the passing of a life by memorializing the body. It's enough to wake the dead.

  
  

  We mourn the "body" as we put it in the ground, drop a flower or two on the casket lid, and blow eternal kisses to the memory of the departed. All the while, the "real" soul watches from above (or below, I guess, depending upon your point of view and the moral makeup of the departed) possibly chuckling at all the pomp and circumstance. A lot of kids might see their first "dead body" when their grandmother or grandfather dies, or a favored pet is put to sleep, or maimed by another neigborhood pet, or the first dead body might be a small birdling who has fallen from the nest while the child is on his way to school. I don't remember any pets or birds when I was a kid, and my grandparents died four states away. My first dead body was a human, and he wasn't related to me.

  
  

  The first one was our neighbor, who passed when I was just a little kid, possibly six or seven years old. The search engine in my brain can't recollect his name. Both he and his wife were elderly. He was probably suffering from dementia (senility, it was called in those days) because I frequently heard him "talking to the trees' in his back yard. He had a heart attack, and perished quickly, and the next thing you know, there was an emergency vehicle and an ambulance parked in front of the nieghbor's house, and old Mr. Whateverhisnamewas was carted off the the mortuary. I clearly remember seeing his white face peeking out from under the sheet covering him on the gurney as they wheeled him into the back of the emergency vehicle. Or was I only imagining things?
  Later, our family went to the funeral, and seeing him all pasty faced and white lying in the coffin was eerily fascinating. I poked his hand, which felt all rubbery and unreal. The details were more studiously examined than was the idea of death mourned. I learned in Church that we all pass away eventually, and I'm sure Mr. Whateverhisnamewas led a grand life, even if the trees never responded to his final conversations. Mrs. Whateverhisnamewas became a bit of a hermit after his death, and I don't recall whatever happened to her. Doubtless at some point, she died.

  
  

  The next one was closer to me than even a neighbor. Even though I live near L.A., where the social makeup is pretty diversified, the media has always portrayed the fair City of Angels as a place where high rollers sniff cocaine in high rises, and on the gang and crime riddled streets, anyone walking along minding thier own business might either stumble across a dead body or become one in a hail of crosstown crossfire. I've seen very few dead bodies, and none littering the streets. I'm sure I saw my fill of dead pigeons, and roadkill on the highway. Roadkill doesn't bother me insomuch as the animal whose soul is now also in the hereafter has ceased to be on this plane of existence. I always swerve around these sad reminders of life on Earth. The small ones, like possums, poodles, and assorted cats, can easily be overlooked as one is speeding by, but the larger dobermans, great danes, and especially for some reason, the german shepherds, cause me more discomfort when I see their twisted bodies briefly as I make a sharp turn around them into the other lane.
  The "next one" was my father. I was 21, and on vacation camping in the hills above San Francisco, when I had to cut the vacation short, and take my very first plane trip back to Glendora to bury his body. The first time I saw "him" in his indisposed state was on his back in the viewing room of the Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary. The room was lit with natural light, streaming in through vertical blinds. It was all very modern, this was in 1974, and not like a dark mortuary or a tomb. Father lay there in an ill fitting suit, which he probably wore about three times in life. My visit included preparations for the funeral, since Mother was in the nursing home and I was executor of the estate. I didn't hang around Dad too long, but soon was in the office of the guy who sells the goods, with his sliding wall suddenly revealing tombstones, and the "hidden door" which opened to a new car showroom full of shiny expensive caskets. Rose Hills did the "secular and/or religious burial" thing really swiftly and professionally. There were there to help. Right up until the check for the services was signed. I'd just been in college for four years, where I learned about "beauracratic bullshit" from the experts at USC, and with my visit to see my second dead body, that of my father, in 1974, at Rose Hills, I learned about the business of business, and how it works, even when one person's business has ended permanently.

  
  

  Dead body #3 would be Tom, my ex best friend. Only "ex" insomuch as he became a dead body back in 1987, when he was only in his thirties. I've written about Tom in the past. I was a pallbearer at his funeral in 1987. He was big as life as he lay there dead. I cried profusely, and it took six of us fairly strong guys to lay his 300 plus pound carcass into the ground. I still visit Tom's gravesite and we laugh and talk about Buddy Holly and John Coltrane. Well, I talk. I suppose he listens. I never hear him laugh, though. When his soul passed into heaven, his laugh died with him. Here's to ya, Tom. We'll laugh together sooner than later, I surmise.

  
  

  It seemed the dead bodies were dropping from the sky by now. No, not a flock of diseased pigeons, but my friend Bob, who had a heart attack in the bathroom at age 47 back in 1994. I used to live with Bob, and was staying with him on the weekends after I broke up with then girlfriend Pat. One weekend right before Christmas, he went to the shi**er for the last time. My now roommate Joel was the one to find him. Joel came home from a party, and wanted to go to the bathroom in which Bob had permanently passed out. He banged on the door. Joel,not Bob. And Bob didn't answer. Joel went into his room for a while, and then returned to the bathroom door, knocking harder than ever. He finally pushed open the door, where Bob, naked and dead, lay out by the toilet. Joel came to get me, impermanently passed out on the living room couch, and he told me Bob needed artificial respiration. One look at him and I told Joel he needed a slab at the morgue. Joel tried to revive him and we carried his naked body to the living room, where Joel needlessly attempted to revive him. I wasn't an expert on the subject, but I could tell he'd been gone for a few hours. I was a pallbearer at ol' Bob's funeral too. After a viewing of his body at the morturary down the street from where he and Joel lived at the time, I and a girl Bob knew who was visiting at the same time, and who I met that night at the mortuary, got a six pack of beer and sat outside in her pick up telling Bob stories. Before we retired to the truck, we bullshi**ed with Bob in the casket. He didn't look particularly "dead", but he had been in the morgue for almost a week following his passing, so he probably should have looked worse.

  
  

  I would write that Bob was my last dead body, but this isn't exactly true. I've been "online" since 1996, and I've always been involved with one or two online "communities". I would get to know people by their personal websites, which a lot of people had in the late 90s, like we have blogs today. "Cutedog" was one of my online "friends" and I visited her site, and we would chat on the ICQ often. After almost a year when I wasn't actively participating in the group in which I "knew" her, I visited her site, and was overwhelmed with sadness. Here is what I wrote in my website telling what happened.

  
  

  "CuteDog (A Remembrance)"
  by Michael F. Nyiri

  
  

  September 6th, 2001

  
  

  I often write about how the internet is "instantaneous". As a medium of communication there has never been anything faster. Especially late at night in the shadows, with only the glare of the screen to cast them, there is nothing so instantaneous as reading an answer from the other side of the globe, across the seas of time and space.
  At times the internet makes me feel like all of mankind is connected, a pulsating seething mass of humanity, hoping to communicate , enrich, and be enriched by commingling with life.
  The reality, of course, is that the internet is just another form of entertainment, and at times we are entertaining ourselves, but we are communicating in a far more immense manner than we know. We are touching others with our pages, and we are capable of being touched in the most profound of manners.
  I am a very cynical and questioning sort, and I have been for years. But I can easily cry when I am touched, and I try to keep this sense as I age. Something to counter the cynicism and ill attempts at humor.
  Well, tonight I wish to leave the humor at the door.
  As always, pleased with the selfish accomplishments I have made, and wish to share, I was going through my guestbooks in an attempt to "reconnect" with people who have visited me at my site by visiting theirs again, and signing the guestbook or sending a personal email. In my real life, and in my virtual life, I seldom burn bridges, but I pass along so many of them that a lot of connections are severed very simply, and if I pass along again, I always want to open the gate again, and keep in touch.
  While performing this exercise, I was hit with the following message when I clicked on a link to an old correspondent's website.
  "CuteDog Passed Away Last Night at 10pm est."
  I still am shuddering. Grief has catapulted through the computer screen with the instantaneous immediacy of the internet. The date was Dec. 2000. It has been at least that long since I'd visited her website.
  This has never happened to me before, so to temper this feeling I feel, this terrible emptiness for a person I didn't "really know" but felt I knew, a soul with whom I must have corresponded merely eight or ten times, and then mostly when I was in the Site Fights competition, and yet I feel as if we talked to each other while in the same room.
  This is the saddest and gravest feeling I have ever felt in my short 50 years on this planet. I have known many who have passed, my dear parents so long ago that I can hardly remember them at times, two of my best friends, both too young to go, one by a terrible accident. Just last week, the wife of one of the technicians at work passed, and I felt bad then. But I know about death. Death is my friend. Death has always caused me grief, but I view it as the passage to something more important, so I live with it. Death is the next chapter after this, and it lasts far longer.
  But this feeling I am feeling now is different.
  It is an all-encompassing-sadness. Because the internet "seems" so immediate, so much "realer than real" at times, being hit by news that seems like it's a sudden email you open, but yet was written by her husband nearly a year ago, seems so strange, and yet wonderful all at the same time.
  Tears fell down my cheeks as I scrolled down CuteDog's website. It was the same website, with the same links, the same pages, the same awards, the same.
  And yet, of course, not the same.
  Our websites are our memorials on the internet, and CuteDog's husband, by the very act of telling me, as if from a time machine, that his wife had died, because I clicked a link to her website, elicits from me not only instantaneous grief, but compassion and consolation for her husband, who saved her website, which will "live" in eternity.
  I didn't know Cutedog, really, but I knew her.
  She and I had a "linked" relationship, and we touched each others souls.
  Her soul touches me as I write, as I cry, and as I remember.
  As I remember that I wouldn't even know she existed , and wouldn't know her sense of humor or her beauty, or her kindness, observances, or intelligence.
  She wouldn't exist, to me, if there wasn't an internet. And she didn't exist for me before I "met" her on the internet.
  And now I grieve, nearly a year later, for this lost life, and this tender memorial.

  
  

  
  "CuteDog"
   
  4:49 pm pst September 6, 2001
  poetry by Michael F.Nyiri

  
  

  
  CuteDog passed away last night, a night countless nights ago,
  and I just found out tonight, by visiting her website, and recieved this shocking blow.
  For a soul whom I hardly had visited lately, late news of a frightening sort
  If only my emails had been more frequently sent
  Her humanity has been cut immediately short.
  Her photo survives, as do her soft words,
  And the presence I felt at her site,
  And the site still exists, in the ethereal mists, and the feeling there feels just so right.

  
  

  
  CuteDog lives in perpetuity tonight, and tomorrow in our minds and our hearts
  I will promise to visit her website in depth, and find her word, so comforting
  In pages and in parts of her persona, her humor, her reality in virtual space.
  Because that part of her will always live on, and inspire us to see her sweet face.

  
  

  
  CuteDog I am sad for your husband and family and your friends,
  But I am happy for the universal existence which brought us together in the first place.
  Happy for the fact that you still exist in cyberspace,
  And thanks to your husband I can still visit you there.
  The souls pass into the otherland, but the universal mind is everywhere.

  
  

  
  CuteDog passed away last night,
  And I scroll her life and sigh.
  Her existence is still amongst us on her site
  As I linger, my heart feels a cry.

  
  

  
  Michael F. Nyiri
  copyright 2001

  
  

  
  I didn't really know Cutedog in life. I didn't act as pallbearer. I didn't attend the funeral. I didn't see a "body". But "Cutedog" was the first of my "internet dead bodies" and since this is an article about dead bodies on the internet, I feel as if a tone of sadness in an otherwise tongue in cheek article about a dire and dreadful subject is in order, and offer my memories of my first internet body. She wasn't the first, just as Mr. Whateverhisnamewas wasn't the last. People live, and people die.

  
  

  Death is the last fact of life. We live. We breathe. And then we stop. And become "dead bodies" ourselves.

  
  

  
  "The Breath of Life"
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  January 11, 2007 6:43 a.m. pst

  
  

  
  We breathe,
  first encompassing a cry,
  somewhat belabored
  and finally full,
  a measure for measure
  the bellows of being
  the soft inhale and exhale of subsistance

  
  

  So it goes
  from the first year to the last,
  heaving the chest with life
  regulating the air
  permitting our minds to cogitate and reason
  allowing our hearts to love with each beat
  inhale
  exhale
  through wakefulness
  and repose

  
  

  The body eventually
  degenerates,
  ignoring the mind's consternation
  rebuffing the heart's caring nature
  and breath becomes brittle,
  belaboring more,
  becoming hoarse
  expectorating
  wheezing
  winding down

  
  

  So it goes
  as the final curtains are drawn
  and the valedictory is prepared
  the breath of existence slows
  with a subtle shallowness
  until,
  without respect for heart or mind,
  the cessation arrives
  and we inhale the final breath
  from the surface of terra firma

  
  

  Our body is prepared
  for internment in that same earth
  from which we breathed so bounteously

  
  

  Inhalation, the breath of life
  Exhalation, the elixer of expiration
  So it goes
  So it goes
  So it goes

  
  

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  EDIT: 2/07/07 4:30pm pst. This is an article about "dead bodies". So this update is fitting. I was just going to go over to Singing Fish, the audio/video search engine which allows me to stream this music, to find another song I wanted to give a listen, and the site has disappeared. I'm redirected to AOL Video, the site which undoubtedly "bought" the URL. So another website which offered links to various audio and video clips for download from a number of places on the internet,  has 'died" and become a "dead body" just like Napster before it, and the "free internet" before that. I'll bet soon YouTube will ask me to pay to store my videos there. There is no such thing as a free lunch, even on the internet, anymore. RIP, Singing Fish. You supplied me with lots of great music over the years!

  • 11:43 pm
  • 34 Comments