Kiss me deadly...

Today, out of sheer curiosity, I looked into a dead person's eyes. I
guess that she'd been dead for about a week and she was decaying pretty
badly. I had seen dead people before but they have usually been taken
care of by morticians and made to look as if they were peacefully
resting. This was an entirely different case. She had gone a terrible
green and grey colour and her skin was peeling away from her body.
Thick rivers of blood, mucus and who knows what kinds of secretions had
poured from her mouth and nose to form a crust of coagulated muck about
her face. Her eyes were open. I will never forget those eyes! They may
have been beautiful in life but now they were like crushed and holed
ping pong balls. The iris of her right eye had burst into a kind of
star shape whilst her other eye sat sunken and twisted into the wrong
direction. Her mouth looked as if she had tried to form a word as she
died. It looked like she was trying to say, "You" but death stole her
final breath and the word remained limp on her tongue. Her teeth were
bright and clean looking and seemed totally at odds with her blackened,
shrunken face. Her hair was stylish and blonde in life. You can see
that she would have once been extremely attractive but despite the
expensive clothing, wonderful eyes, blonde and bright hair, she was the
one stretched out on the mortuary table and I was the unhappy
spectator.

I don't know the circumstances of her demise and maybe it is better
that I don't but she has taken the sheen of "cool" away from death.
Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. It's just not
possible to do that. Death is not a beautiful thing and there will be
no choir of angels to take you on to a better place. Just an ambulance
or a hearse. Death sells all sorts of products these days. It promotes
films, music, books and art but we rarely ever get to see it as it
really is. Today, I saw death in it's full and final flush. It was not
a pretty sight but it was an education. I feel that I understand my own
mortality a little more clearly now and while I have no fear of heaven
or hell, I am saddened by the humbling finality of it all. All previous
thoughts of suicide are gone and I don't want to die. I know that I
cannot cheat death and I am going towards my own end someday, but I now
intend to celebrate life as much as I once celebrated death.