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| For twenty years, my
son was a living, breathing, child with a personality and feelings and yet the
second that he died, he was impersonally referred to as "the body". Just a
couple of hours after he died following an intentional Heroin overdose on 1
November 2002, I recall someone telling me that until the post mortem had been
conducted, they wouldn’t be able to release "the body". So that was it
then. The instant that my son was pronounced dead, he was no longer the
Kristian that we knew and loved. He was "the body". Whilst I acknowledge that Kristian’s body was just a shell for his spirit and that when he died, "the body" was no longer the boy that I had known for 20 years, it still upset me to hear my son described like a nameless, invalid piece of meat. Maybe he no longer had feelings, but those he had left behind certainly did. It seemed as though respect for a person ended the moment they died. My son’s body was how I identified him as the person that he was. Even the clothes that he wore on his body were an indication of his personality and a reminder of the son who I had nurtured, loved, guided, scolded and with whom I had shared happy and sad times. I knew that when he died, his body ceased to function, his brain became inert and he was physically dead, but since I could not visualise his spirit, I had to focus on his body as being him. We live in a physical world where the emphasis is on physical things to which we become attached. Kristian communicated with others through his physical body - his ears, eyes, mouth, hands and limbs, as we all do. After his death, his soul continued to have a connection to his physical body in the sense that I associated his soul with the speech, actions and expressions that emanated from his physical body. Therefore, referring to the child that I had loved dearly as "the body" was intensely painful and made it brutally clear that he would never walk through my door again. We will often be told that it is "the person inside that counts" and yet, when we see someone for the first time, we judge them by their appearance, not their soul. I can talk about the person that Kristian was, his sense of humour, his impulsiveness, his compassion and his naivety and yet even when I am describing his character, I am visualising his body; the way that he looked, the way that he dressed, the way that he moved, his facial expressions and his mannerisms. I cannot visualise his soul, only his body. It was the body to which I had given birth, the body I had watched grow and change, the warm, soft body I had hugged, kissed and tucked up into bed at night, the body from which tears of sadness had fallen and peels of laughter had emanated. It was the body that portrayed my son’s soul. Some people reading this might be thinking, "Well, at least you had a body to visit", because of the violent nature of some deaths means that seeing their child is not possible and yet they too will probably have a visual image of their child when they are thinking and talking about them. Even those who have the opportunity of viewing their child at a chapel of rest may still choose not to do so, preferring to remember their child as they were in life. Not everyone wants the image of their dead child to haunt them forever. In life, the body and the spirit are inextricably linked. We refer to someone as having a "kind face", or a "friendly smile", or a "mean expression", because our emotions and personality are expressed through our faces and our physical bodies. When a child dies by suicide away from the home environment, there is often a strong urge to see, touch or hold their child. Not only did they not have the chance to say goodbye, but our minds require evidence that our child’s life has ended and the presence of their body provides this evidence, however painful it might be. When I visited Kristian at the funeral parlour following the Post-Mortem, although he still looked like my little boy, there was no doubt that he had changed. Although his lips were still so soft and his face was perfect, his neck was purple and swollen and foul-smelling fluid was seeping from the stitched incision around his neck onto the oyster-coloured satin cloth that lined his white coffin. His hands had turned pallid, waxy and wrinkled, almost as though he had taken a long bath and his body felt rigid and inhuman. At the back of his scalp there were crude stitches running up and over his head from ear-to-ear and his beautiful hair was matted together in stiff clumps around the slit. My beautiful son’s body had been violated and treated like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block, even though in life he had violated his own body with drugs. A year and a half on, I visit my son’s grave and visualise him beneath the earth that has been continually adorned with flowers, candles and words of love. I am visualising the body that was my son, the body that encompassed everything that he was. We are constantly reminded that it is not exterior image that is important, but the personality beneath and yet all this changes when someone dies, as you realise the enormous significance of the body. For some people, the body is an obsession in life, but for me, the body became an obsession in death. I still tell people that I have four children, but I also mention that my eldest son died. I refuse to deny Kristian’s existence. He was a major part of my life for over twenty years and he still lives on in my head, my heart and my memory. I raised four children and therefore I am still a mother of four, even though one of them is now, apparently, "the body". |
