Synical

[Sweetcherrie]

It wasn't the first time I’d ever seen a dead body. The sun shining on his deceased face made him look even more ill then he already did, and I strangely noted that all dead people looked waxy. This guy certainly did, but then again he had of course suffered from cancer for two years, and it was easily visible that the illness had eaten him from inside out.

 

Not knowing exactly why I had come to this funeral again, I just stood there and stared at the man in the coffin, vaguely remembering that he was a friend of a friend of a second cousin, or something.

 

It’s not as if it was the first time that I went to a funeral without really having known the person. Last year alone I had visited forty three funerals of different people, varying from a close friend that had died in a gruesome accident to a complete stranger that had died in his sleep at the age of eighty-six.

 

Somehow the funerals made me feel, and then I don’t mean that I like rolling around in sadness or something, no I mean feel that I was still alive. I normally don’t feel too much of that you see. It’s one of those things that I didn’t even know existed until the first time I had a funeral.

 

I remember that one well.

 

It was when I had just turned seventeen. I had expected rain and storm, but instead the sun was shining, and I remember that I found this the weirdest thing. It was my granddad who had passed away, and since I hardly knew him I didn’t feel too much about him either.

 

He had also died of cancer now I was thinking of it, and somehow they were always yellow when they died. I read somewhere that this was all due to liver failure, and I wondered if I would turn yellow after I’d died. Probably, but looking at the face of my granddad, yellow and tainted with cancer spots, I felt alive.

 

It was nice to feel alive, and I guess the need to feel alive came forth from the fact that it was pretty certain that I would look yellow I died. I smoked more than a pack of cigarettes a day, and if that wouldn’t make me turn yellow, the 8 bottles of whiskey I drank per week probably would. Funny enough I used these drugs to stop feeling the pain from life again.

 

Standing at this coffin suddenly felt preposterous.

 

Maybe I was only here to remind myself of my own mortality, to remember that I too would die, and probably soon if I kept going the way I had been for the past couple of years. Maybe I was simply here to pay my honors to a guy I hadn’t known, and who had never known me.

 

Maybe I was here to remind myself to enjoy life more often. To enjoy the simple things that were given each day; the sunshine, the sky, the warm smile a stranger could give you if you could give the directions he had been looking for, for forever.

 

Forever. Funny word. Possibly I was only here to see what forever looked like. To see what death looked like, to see how others saw death, and to see what it would be like to have gone to ‘forever’.

 

To hear what people said. “What a shame, he was so young.” Or maybe, “I wish he had listened to the doctors.” Or even, “I didn’t know him too well, but he was always kind to me.”

 

That last was most likely.

 

Hah! in the end the only one who would be standing at my coffin would probably be my mother. And when seeing how yellowy-orange I would be she would probably say something like, “I don’t understand it, Jeffrey didn’t even like carrots.”