Meditations on the ultimate interloper

By Helena Fahnrich

I have seen one dead body.

My grandmother died three years ago, my grandfather about 15 years ago. The funeral I went to, however, was not one of theirs, nor was the body I saw. The funeral and the body were those of a boy I had met my freshmen year of college.

It was a private college and he was the goalie for the soccer team. I met him through friends who smoked pot. He took up an OxyContin habit from his sister’s boyfriend’s backdoor pharmacist, and eventually that boyfriend led him on to shooting heroin. Richie was found dead somewhere on the south side in a car by the police. I remember not getting closer than about 10 feet to the corpse. From afar, his face looked bloated and polished with makeup. Richie. I remember Jerry Garcia singing through the loudspeaker-sounding stereo system in the funeral home. The last time I had seen him was two months before at a concert; high on heroin and standing in a corner, he could not reply to my conversation.

There were several two-by-three-foot tack boards mounted within the room, and there were bunches of pictures pinned against the board like some strange reminiscence of a Sunday school exercise. His father kept saying with a passive, accepting smile on his face, “it was his time—it was just his time to go.” I remained there for a while, looking for something in the room, or among the gatherers, or my memories. Before long his sister and her boyfriend showed up. I sit here now and wonder about my place among them all. I was there because I knew him, because I took his virginity, and I saw his funeral as a farce because I had seen what form the dead heroin addict’s intimacy took. The Living hold funeral gatherings. What is death?

An unsubstantial erotic encounter between two people
who had shared shreds of substance abuse,
and social circles,
danced around a young woman’s incessant longing for fulfillment
and a young man’s sense of cavalier.
They partook in each other’s weaknesses at their own, separate discretion.

The corpse I saw that day was a metaphor for the relationships I had with Richie himself as well as the rest of the people I knew then. That day we were drawn together by something powerful, by both life and death, yet simultaneously I felt there was something off. Like trying to sail over sand, or going swimming in jeans and a sweatshirt, riding the wave of humanity loses its swing when effort and motion mean something else.

So then, is that what death is? Swinging? I feel compelled to say no, but then I think of Bob Marley’s funeral procession. It became a massive, joyous, and musical celebration of his life in the streets of Jamaica. What I felt at Richie’s funeral were the layers of cover-up wearing off the giant face in the room. Part of me identified with his life, and though my addiction took a different form, it was one of many feelings of empathy that stood in front of me when I would see him. That day I was unnerved to see the lifelessness I held within my life by seeing it in his.

There was judgment in that room.
Judgment, a close cry from death.
And death’s accoutrement hung from the ceiling like streams of crepe paper one might walk through at midnight on a New Year’s Eve.
I took fistfuls of them.

I have this belief, or maybe it is a feeling, that caring for someone is supposed to have some underlying unflinching sense of solemnity. Do relationships simply create effects in the lives of people? Knowing a grandmother for 21 years of my intimate life, and seeing the ripple of her passing over time is the significance of death (?). "Passing" is an open well of meaning in the land of description pertaining to death. For example, my father neglected to inform me the details of her funeral. I did not attend. I heard of her death, and then I heard of her funeral. I say this without anger or spite, though, because things have been mended, but I am regularly perplexed by her passing because it literally passed me by. I kept on living my life with this information without having ever seen or been a part of the end of her life. I saw her a few days before she died. My mother and I went to see her. My father was there with my two half-brothers. My brother was there also, and my uncle Eddie. She had been taking spoonfuls of morphine out of a large, amber colored glass jar.

Dear reader, when I die I want to be burned.

8.26.08

Death is a metaphor in my life. All things take shape in some way, for example, a job, finding a book, a mentor, coming upon certain types of music, friendships, vices. The parting of ways is just as much a death as letting go of old forms of identity that might have taken residence within one shape or another.

Death,
to be the face of what I cannot look at
to be the place where I go when I must understand that which I do not want to.
Death is a paradox, for it is a gift,
which I constantly forget.
Death for the day
and the time that it comes for.
There is something that I have nothing to say whatsoever about death.
How can I answer?
Or reply? Or comment?
This has become my ode
to the anthropology of:
Two thousand words on "What is death?"
And what if, at the end, I do not have two thousand words? What then?

8.27.08

Last night, on the 88th anniversary of women winning the right to vote, a young white policeman brought me news of death.

I moved into my apartment two weeks ago, and I have not formally met anyone in my building as of yet. It is a small brick building with just six apartments, and I live on the third floor, in an east-facing apartment. Last week Friday, I woke up a bit late in the morning and left to run some errands in the afternoon, and when I got downstairs there was an obvious gas leak. It was strongest on the first floor, but since the first floor is just three stairs up from the ground floor, I assumed it was seeping up through the woodwork from the basement. When I returned, the aroma had not subsided and I called my landlord. I could even smell gas in my apartment, most notably in the closet next to my bathroom, which I thought odd, and when I left for work I was feeling dizzy. I brought my phone to call Stacey back to see what exactly was going on, but forgot soon after I arrived at the deli.

I remember having the rushed feeling that something was needed. I was in the building, on the other side of a door, above a basement. I was there and capable. Yet, I was simultaneously living my life, taking care of myself by way of mundane responsibilities. I was attending to the details that amounted to less than 10 physical dollars. I was leaving to make sandwiches and close the deli. I happened to not be the person who was to intervene. Can I call myself an interloper?

The policeman said they were not sure about how he died, just that I was not in any danger.

“You have nothing to worry about, it wasn’t a homicide,” were his words. He did not give any other information. I did not ask. Did the boy die from asphyxiation? Did he kill himself? The policeman took notes about my encounter with the gas and so I assume it had some significance.

My computer dictionary defines interloper as, “a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong.” Can I call myself an interloper?

I did not tell him that earlier in the evening, when I was arriving home, there were two boys standing outside. One was on the phone saying things like “Something is wrong,” and, “I can’t get a hold of him. Why isn’t he answering?” When I walked up behind them they asked to be let in, they called me ma’am, and I did.

I remember there were loud bangs coming from downstairs that caused things to rattle. They must have been trying to break the door down. Soon I heard a short, loud, blip from a police car or ambulance, and soon there was a delicate knock on my door.

The policeman said the boy had been dead for about four or five days—it takes a corpse five or six weeks to decompose, that is, if it has not been embalmed by a person in order to interrupt the process of decay. The first week the body bloats, flies and maggots collect at its orifices, due to the bacteria. Did I smell the rot, thinking it was someone’s garbage? I can’t say for sure.

8.30.08

Write something right now.

Boundaries are giving me a block about death, even with the broadness of this topic looking at me in the face. One word—how can I write about one word when my mind is so engorged in emotions that I don’t want to focus?

However, words are what place me back in the perspective of my own identity. How can I speak about death? I don’t know anything about it. I could not even give it a direct look. I’ve run from death, and I run from fear, which is the closest emotion I have to death. What is death? It is fear, and threat, which come as a pair. Death is all the ugly pain in life, it is the dark side, it is confusion. It is a part of life.

Why do all these things, encompassed by the word death, recur in the phases of life, of my life?

Aside from "it’s just the way it is" reasoning, the next obvious thought is that life is the other half of death. If I live, then I must die, and the refraction of these two great archetypes will fill existence with experience. Life and death are events that create the evolution of events. These are the events that create learning and growing, they are the cause of, and for, the cycle of life. The two events tell us plainly why we are here, and why we leave this existence. We are born, and at the end, we die.

Our topic is death, but I am hesitant to write about it because of the dark and ugly things I might uncover to my reader.

Death is the nutcracker to the walnut of my delicate, sensitive love.

It is the humiliation and pain that I find in my heart when I look in the faces of those whom I look to for guidance.

It is the incomprehensible rejection from the intellectual camaraderie that I look for in peers, or rather, my perceived incomprehensible rejection.

It is the process of my awkward youth figuring out the path to proficiency in love and life.

Death is the gradual dull a bottle of whiskey will bring as it goes down “smoothly,” and the satisfaction of cutting my chin on the cement after falling off my bike because I was so drunk; all in the name of love.

It is the comfort in seeing my blood and feeling the flesh of my knuckles scraped off on the brick wall outside.

Death is the sickness of self-abuse, and sharing the camaraderie of this sickness with my father, who laughed and smiled at me with genuine love and empathy when I quoted Dylan to him, “When a bottle gets empty it sure ain’t worth a damn.”

Death is knowing clinical depression and sleepless nights.

It is the fear I have over living in my mind and body.

It is watching my sanity slip through my fingers one cool, fall evening after stepping on my glasses.

Hysterically laughing and crying for 20 minutes, as my aunt attempted to maintain my sanity with her own composure (she has had her share of panic attacks), and it was in her basement that I lost control of my conscious sanity. That night I felt a death that I will never forget.

I throw clichés out the window of the passenger’s side
onto the adopt-a-highway strip.

---

Fahnrich, 24, is a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, with a major in rhetoric and a minor in philosophy. Originally from Racine, she has lived in Milwaukee for six years. A poet and a writer, her writing includes creative nonfiction prose and fiction, though she prefers poetry. Her plans include studying rhetoric at the graduate level. A painter, drawer, and avid film watcher, Fahnrich also pays close attention to astrology, drinks lots of tea, and enjoys camping and swimming laps.