(Trigger alert: suicide)
<Writing my thought out help me to sort out my chaotic feeling, so below would be like a brain dump instead of something very coherent. I likely will rewrite the whole thing using these as my note later. But knowing myself, it is more likely that I would not. And I think my experience may help someone who has a friend who committed suicide or like me, saw a dead body without expecting one. So I will keep writing this for a bit. >
I fell asleep at 11.30 ish last night and woke up at 4 a.m this morning.
And I couldn’t sleep at all.
I don’t usually remember pictures. And I have prosopagnosia, that is, I can’t recognise faces. However, now this imagery of seeing K lying dead on her bed is just stuck in my head.
It was paired with an oddly cold sensation — the feeling when my hand touched her body.
This is not the first time I see a dead body. I guess most of us had seen dead bodies at a funeral with mortuary makeup. On top of that, I saw dead bodies in the morgue and patients who passed away on a hospital bed when I was doing a medical experience program in high school.
However, seeing someone dead probably a day or two is just different.
A patient who passed away in front of your eyes usually still looked like a living person who was sleeping. And they would be covered shortly after.
And I did not realize how a person who died a day or two would look so different.
I cannot even describe where the difference came from. But it is like — you know the person is dead. Just by looking. I am not sure if it is the stillness, stiffness or the subtle abnormal pose. The image in my head actually was not very abnormal, just like a causal sleeping pose.
Except there was a bowl by the side of her face.
But that could also be someone who fell asleep while eating.
So I actually did not know why I could tell she was dead when I see her.
I went to school. The first teacher I met greeted me as usual, “Good morning! How are you doing?”
