The Three Corpses- Call Them the Trifecta or the Stooges

I promise this blog isn't going to be all about death, it just seems to inspire me in some morbid way.

I've seen maybe three corpses in my life.

The first one was my grandma Neva, who I clearly had some issues in dealing with. I don't remember much of her actual body, but I remember touching the coffin.

The second was my grandpa Mayer. I don't remember his body either, I just remember his military respects and the ice cream cone the funeral organizer bought me. It was shaped like the pink panther.

The third was grandpa Honey. His nurse had shaved his mustache and he refused to eat before he died, so he was thin, skeletal, and unrecognizable in the coffin. I didn't touch it or anything, I just held my sister's hand.

At the service, I wasn't crying. I didn't even have any sort of emotions. I made a joke to cheer up my grandma, his daughter, and I thought about how I was sharing a room with a dead body.

When I got told he died, I was in the middle of dancing. After I hung up, I went right back to dancing.

I don't know if it's fully set in yet.

Grandma's Ghost

When I was really young, like five or six, my great-grandma Neva had colon cancer. She'd been sick for as long as I could remember, and to be honest, privately, sometimes I'd wish she'd just die already. I know that's a terrible thing to wish and all, and I don't even have a good defense for myself. I just didn't like going over to her house. It smelled like sickness and old people. Now that I reflect on that smell, there might have been a hint of the sickly-sweet rotting smell of the Grim Reaper's breath. Or maybe that smell was just the smell of all the healthy things like fruits and vegetables that rotted in the kitchen because grandma refused to eat them. The world may never know.

I have the following three memories about grandma Neva:

On her good days, she'd be walking very slowly around the house. I have to note that every surface in the house seemed slightly sticky, like a toddler's hands. No amount of cleaning ever got rid of the stickiness. Interestingly enough, we called Neva's husband 'grandpa Honey,' but it's totally unrelated that a man nicknamed Honey lived in a permanently sticky house.

Anyway, I'd remember her coming up to me with her little-old-lady slow walk. It later turned out she was only sixty or so when she died, but to little me, she was ancient. She'd kiss me all over my face a bunch of times, slobbery ones. I always described her kisses as brown. I don't know why, but to this day the only adjective I can use is brown. It's not like she wore lipstick or anything, it just had the distinct feeling of brown.

My only other memory from when she was still alive was when things started looking really bad. The doctors told us she only had about five days or so, and I remember walking up the skinny, sticky, dark hallway to her room and talking to my mom a few days later.

"There's only three more days until Grandma dies." I'd said. Mom's eyes welled up with tears, and she replied in a sort of broken whisper.

"You're keeping count?"

I'd nodded and entered Grandma's room. I don't know what happened next.

My last memories are from the months after her death. It's not really one solid memory, but it's kind of a blurry collection of half-memories all relating to one thing:

I was pretending to see Grandma's ghost. I don't really have an explanation for why I did this. Maybe I was looking for attention. I was raised Mormon, and I'm sure there was some sort of story about 'sensing your loved ones' presence' that had inspired me to do this.

I remember doing things like pointing into an empty corner and saying "there's Grandma."

If I saw a kid doing that, I'd freak out and probably call an exorcist, but it seemed to make people feel better. My mom says she doesn't remember me pretending to see Grandma, but I do remember it happening, so I'm not sure who I was talking to.

I must have eventually gotten bored, because I slowly stopped. I don't really think about great-grandma Neva anymore. Her husband died last summer, so I don't even have that reminder. I don't remember her much, and I don't mourn her. I don't remember the funeral at all, but at grandpa Honey's funeral, he was buried next to her. When I looked in the plot, I could see the concrete wall of grandma Neva's little chamber-thing that her coffin was sealed in.

Even though I have strong memories of her kissing me on the cheek like a good loving grandmother, seeing that concrete wall is probably the closest I've ever felt to her.

I guess the moral of the story here is whenever you hear those stories about kids claiming to see ghosts, or been to heaven, or remembering a past life, they're probably lying.

This is coming from someone who was one of those kids.

Fifteen Years an Imbecile

Approximately fifteen seconds after creating my blog titled Fifteen Years an Imbecile, I realized the joke would only last until my next birthday, at which point I would then have been Sixteen Years an Imbecile. Sadly, however, foresight is not one of my talents.
Because google won't accept the shrugging emoji as my url, I will accept my fate until I think of a better blog title.
Anyway.
I think this is the part where I include a formal apology to anyone who reads this