You Ever See a Dead Guy?

 

“Did you ever see a dead guy?”  This was the question a guest asked David Letterman on his late night show.  “Sure,” answered David, “I’ve seen thousands of them at funerals.”  Of course, that was not what the guest had in mind.  He wanted to know if he had ever seen a dead guy in the raw—a dead guy somewhere where you aren’t supposed to see dead people.

Most of us have seen death, not staring us in the face, but laid out before us like a work of art to view with others, something like walking through a crowded art museum.  If the funeral defines our experience with death, we know little about its ugly side.  Regardless of how much we grieve, we get together with people sharing our loss and loss, remember the good times and the bad, and tell stories over and over again that bring joys and tears at the same time.  We eat and drink with family and friends while reminiscing about the past to which this person has now been committed.  We go into a house of worship and listen to a professional mourner talk about this person and then we go to look at him or her and marvel at how good they look.  We may even break down and cry over the coffin, but the pain and all the bad memories will someday be forgotten, or at least diminished, and we will remember only the good.  If that is what you have seen, a sanitized version of death, you have never seen a dead guy.

Have you ever helped pull a dead body from a car wreck?  It’s not a pleasant sight to see how badly the body can be broken.  Seeing a man lying in a house with a shotgun wound to his chest, his eyes vacantly pointing unfocused at a spot unknown, is death in the raw.  He is a stranger and so is his wife who is in the other room crying for what she has done.  You don’t know either of them or what brought on this tragedy.  There is no food and drink.  There are no sad or happy stories, no laughing and no crying.  There are no mourners.  There may later be a grieving mother or a grieving father, a sister or a brother lost in their not knowing how it is that this vital young man is suddenly gone.  There is nothing you can do.  As you walk through the room your eyes suddenly come into the space where the dead man’s dead eyes seem to be looking and you see not the dead man but catch a glimpse of death itself.  It can be ugly and hideous. 

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  As a youngster, perhaps 10 years old or so, my cousin and I were riding bicycles in a suburb of Oklahoma City.  A loud roar went overhead and crashed in the yard next to us.  He and I, as you would expect of any young boys, hurried over to have a front row seat.  Our youthful curiosity led us into a sobering scene of destruction and death, a place where small children should not venture.  I had always been fascinated with airplanes.  A youthful encounter with those amazing flying machines had opened vistas rarely imagined by one whose feet are firmly placed on the solid footing of mother earth.  But, there I stood looking at twisted metal, hardly recognizable for what it had been only a few seconds earlier.  Something dropping from the sky seldom holds its original form.  And the devastation of the done to the twisted metal paled to the damage done to the man and the woman who only a few seconds were riding in that machine.  I saw one torso lying by itself near a couple of arms and a leg looking as if they had been surgically severed from a human body.  There was a head nearby.  I couldn’t find the other one.  Most of the bodies were fragments.  They were picked up with tissue and placed in a bag.  All that damage was contained in a small back yard of a small house in a suburb filled with other small houses.  Surely there would someday be memorials and eventually happy memories for the ones left behind.  But, that day I learned that death can be ugly and hideous.

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  It came suddenly but realizing what had happened, fully realizing that he was gone was laborious.  I was high school age living with my parents in the country about six miles from the nearest town, about fifteen miles from the nearest hospital.  A car drove up to the house and came to a sudden stop.  Id didn’t know the car but I did know the driver.  He was a kid just a year or  two younger than me, Jackie Brimer.  We had gone to the little country school called Hext.  We were both were from close families that knew the difficulties of eking out a living from the sandy land cotton farms of that region.  He was a good kid.  We were not close friends but we were a little more than simply close acquaintances.  He had been crying and driving all too fast on those poor roads.  He ran to the house and told us his father had passed out and could we call for an ambulance.   And, then, as quickly as he had appeared he was gone, returning from whence he had come.  We made the call and it would take an hour in those days for the ambulance to find their home.  Both my parents kept a large oxygen bottle next to their bed.  They both had heart trouble and when their breathing was labored or when they had severe chest pains, they would lie there breathing in pure oxygen.  We wrestled that bottle into the back seat of my car and drove as fast as we could to the Brimer home.  What we found was a chaotic scene of fear and confusion.  We carried the oxygen bottle inside and put the mask on him just in case he was still breathing.  He wasn’t.  We were pretty certain of that.  He had soiled himself which is not unusual for a person who dies.  He wasn’t moving.  We didn’t know to try to feel a heartbeat in the carotid artery in those days.  We tried to feel a pulse in his wrist.  My father placed his ear near the nostrils of the man to try to detect breathing and I lightly placed my hand on his chest to try to detect the same thing.  His wife was sitting nearby, crying.  She probably knew all our efforts were useless.  There were two small children with her crying because their mother was.  There was a daughter a year or two older than me who was crying hysterically while bathing his face with a damp cloth.  Across the room was an older daughter who had been blind since birth; she hadn’t been taught to be a part of the world.  She had been hidden from sight of the community, her family having been embarrassed by what they had deemed a deformity, and that had resulted in a sightless person somewhat socially insecure.  She was sitting alone.  No one was comforting her; no one was telling her what was going on.  She was more afraid than anyone in that little house.  The ambulance finally arrived and he was taken to the hospital.  There was a general consensus that he was dead, but they put their oxygen on him just in case.  For whoever this man was, for whatever his failings as a husband and father may have been, he loved them in his own way and they loved him.  And he was gone.  And the fear they felt for the uncertain days ahead came before the memories, the recriminations, and the mourning.  Death can be ugly and hideous.

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  Too many.