I See Dead People, Part 1

First off, I'd like to extend a heartfelt thanks to those who read my first entry and welcomed me so warmly to the world of blogging.

Secondly, I'd like to warn readers of this entry that it will include some graphic descriptions of something horrible I witnessed.

Before the horror, something a little more lighthearted:

Jen and I vandalized the holiday photo we sent out this year. We managed to look like a happy family despite the fact that it took several attempts to get a decent photo and Jen and I then struggled to agree on which photo to use. After all of that, we blew off some steam by defacing ourselves and our pets. Maury, the orange kitty, was the only one we left untouched, other than the speech balloon which has him saying, "I Hates Holidays."

Well, enough silliness. And yes, a depiction of our dog Lady with blood pouring from her nostrils and mouth is silly compared to what follows. I really wanted to start a blog to collect some funny stories from my life, but I can't get them to come out unless I let some of the horror out first.

I see dead people. No, not like Haley Joel Osmet. I guess I should say I've seen dead people. Not the grotesquely made up and dressed up run of the mill corpses you see in a casket at a funeral, though I've seen plenty of those. I'm talking about dead bodies in the moments after life has left them. I've seen several of them. I never wished for this, I don't particularly enjoy it, but it's still a part of my life and so I'm sure it has become a part of who I am. For this post I'll relate the first time I saw a dead person.

January 14th, 1981. I was a freshman in high school. School had just ended for the day and I was on my way out the front doors to get on the bus with my next door neighbor Jeff. Just before we went out the doors, we heard a bang like a firecracker. Jeff looked at me and said "What was that?" I just shrugged. It was January in Southwest Michigan, and there was a lot of fresh white snow outside, but as we exited the school, I saw that the snow was streaked with red. Blood. Lots of it. At this point my puny freshman brain struggled to explain to itself what it was seeing. Not connecting the sound we had heard with what I was seeing, I thought to myself, "Man, somebody got hit hard with an iceball!" We took a few more steps, and there was a lot more blood. A few feet away I saw a steaming pile of what appeared to be vomit. My brain said, "Wow, somebody got hit so hard with that iceball that they puked!" Then I saw blood in the stuff and thought, "Well, no, there wasn't an iceball, somebody is so sick they're puking blood, gross!" I got right up to the pile and saw that there was hair in it. All thought stopped. I noticed there was somebody lying on the sidewalk, feet toward me. I looked at Jeff, and he looked at me, and we walked right up to the person. At this point, something in my brain shutoff, and I have no visual memory of what I saw. I just have a memory of two fleeting thoughts: "Half his head is gone." "Is that his eyeball?"

I don't remember how Jeff and I made it to the bus. I remember sitting on the bus and watching the principle put his suit coat over the guy's head, and how the profile of the guy's head was nothing but red.

I don't know how information spreads, but on the school bus I found out a few things. The guy was Harry, a senior. His girlfriend had just broken up with him. He had been showing people a civil war replica pistol at school that day.

I got home and told my parents that some guy had shot himself at school. I didn't tell them what I had seen. I don't know why.

The next day at school, all of the bloody snow was gone. They brought in counselors for kids to talk to, but since I didn't know the guy, I didn't think I had any need to see one.

This is a picture of the front of my high school. Right behind that pine tree is where I saw my first dead person. For a couple of years afterwards I kept a secret. There were a couple of big splotches of blood on the front of the high school. Right by the bushes. I looked at them everyday. I was amazed they were missed, that no one else saw them. I looked at them and wondered why I couldn't remember looking right at Harry's dead body, and I felt frustrated. I swore I would pay attention if I ever saw something like that in the future. I would look at those spots every day, then at night I would watch horror movies or action movies, hoping there would be an exploding head, or someone shot in the head, or someone's head would be crushed so I could concentrate on it, remember the details, decide if it was realistic or not.

One day I had to stay after school for some student government thing, or quiz bowl, or one of my other dorky high school endeavors. I was sitting outside, waiting to be picked up, alone. The janitor came out with a bucket of water and a hard bristled brush. He dipped the brush in the water, then scrubbed the blood splotches off of the wall. I couldn't believe it. My secret gone. I was glad I was there to see it, or I might have thought the splotches were never there at all. I hated seeing it though. It should never have been so easy to wash away.