No love for the dead

People say nobody gives a shit until you die. But nobody gives a shit when you die, either. Your body can be lying in the middle of the floor and your family will gather around it to talk about how inconvenient this is for them and joke about who is going to get your CDs.

This is what I did yesterday.

It wasn't someone in my family who died (they're dead already), but one of my best friend's moms. We got back to his place and she was just dead on the floor. He called an ambulance while I checked on her. But she was cold. Stiff. So long.

Everything happens way too fast and way too slow. It takes the cops a long time to get there, the coroner is hours later, then you have to talk to a funeral home and they send people to pick up the body. In all we were just chilling there with her corpse for eight hours.

And that feels slow until you realize that in the last eight hours you found a dead body, talked to the cops, a coroner, a funeral home, and this woman's whole family came and went. You had too many conversations and learned too many things, and you can't remember any of it but your lungs hurt from smoking too many cigarettes.

That feels fast.

And even faster is how quickly people get used to it. Oh she's dead? Fuuucckkk! Anyway, this is going to be so annoying. What do we do with... it? Do we need a lawyer? Well, I have to work, so one of you will have to handle the funeral. Can I eat this leftover pasta? Where did she keep her coin collection? Holy fuck this lamp is awesome, is anyone taking that? Traffic is so bad right now I gotta get out of here early. You think Trump is going to bomb Iran? 

She's just lying there. And it really doesn't matter. 

The moment they finally take her away is the one time everybody stops for a second and seems to realize what's actually happening. This is it. The last time they'll ever see her. They keep the blanket off her face as they wheel her out of the room so everybody can say goodbye. And they do.

And then they go home and watch TV.

You think moments like this are going to be the end of the world. It's painful, and you'll miss your people, but for me what hurts the most is that it doesn't hurt enough.

Everything this woman ever was is gone. All she did and everything she experienced. Small fragments of it will be remembered, incompletely and incorrectly, by a few people every now and then, and quickly pushed out of their minds because they have better shit to do.

If you don't have real love and connections, nobody really thinks of you when you're alive and nobody will really think of you when you're dead. Even your own family. All I can learn from this is to love more deeply.