I See Dead People

   A week or two before this past Halloween, I came across a website (appearing before me, magically, likely either on Facebook or Twitter), which creeped me out. It could well be that it was only out there for public consumption due to the proximity of All  Hallows Eve or it may have been fairly random but it still creeped me out.

   It focused on the Victorian habit of having portraits taken of deceased family members. Quite often the family member in question would be arranged so as to appear as natural as possible, sometimes in a sleeping position or occasionally propped up by mechanical means in a pose. If you're wondering what I'm speaking about and want to perhaps take a look at the website then it is here for your perusal. I would offer the warning, though, that there is a very discomfiting feeling to some of the pictures you will see and you are not going to be able to unsee what you have viewed at the end of the experience.
   As much as these portraits made me eerily uneasy, at the same time I had to look at them, I almost couldn't stop myself.
   I don't know if there is a name for this affliction of mine, this desire to immerse myself in the macabre, but I have been this way for a long time. I remember in public school we had a series of people come to talk about different vocations there were out there and one of these people was an undertaker. He had brought along with him a couple of the tools of his trade and one of them was the tool they use to wire shut the jaws of corpses. It was a little like a staple gun, with wires, and he demonstrated their use on a piece of board he brought along with him. At the end of the presentation, I quite timidly approached him and asked if I could have the board he'd used. He said yes and I ended up taking the board home and eventually hung  it on my bedroom wall, as a piece of art, I guess. Not sure what my parents thought....
   Later on in life, every time I came across a picture of a dead person (think crime scenes and war photos and the ilk) I stopped and, for lack of a better word, soaked it in. It was almost as if I was attempting to come to grips with the whole mortality thing and the more time I spent contemplating death's aftermath, the less foreign (and scary) it might become.

   There is a museum just outside of London and in one section of it are housed large machines, tractors and threshers and....horse-drawn hearses. Hearses from the mid to late 19 century and I am drawn to them like flies to a carcass. They are eerie and ancient and those are two of the things I love about them. It is difficult not to look at them and think of the countless lifeless bodies they carried and all the personal histories which ended at that point in the journey.
   The first dead body I can remember seeing in person was when the father of my best friend in public school passed away unexpectedly. My dad took me to the funeral home and I can clearly remember walking up the aisle to where the open casket was. In my mind I was thinking please no, please no, please no and then I was there, staring down at him. I'm not sure what I had been expecting but the reality was much less terrifying than the expectation. No viewing since then has disturbed me nearly as much, having realized how antiseptic the experience could be.
   Obviously the Victorian days have passed and we no longer feel the need to gather around our loved ones who have passed, for photos. Instead, we are generally blessed with being able to view pictures of them in various stages of the lives they lived, as they were living them. To be clear, I am drawn even more to these portrayals of the fully alive then I am to portraits of the deceased. Occasionally, though, I see dead people. And I kind of like it.