The man I want to be...
My dad.

After fighting leukemia for 12 years without any fuss whatsoever, he finally succumbed to the disease.

Even worse than seeing his lifeless body was watching the undertakers taking it out...I cried like I've never done before (tearing up a little as I write this).

Then, 3 months later, my sister died from cancer.

To round off the year, my ankle got broken in a New Year's Eve fracas.

Sorry for no humour etc.
( snee held his breath since, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:39, Reply)

Again, not me, but...
A good mate (no names) has seen more than his fair share of dead bodies (at least, for a normal person who’s trade doesn’t involve corpses on a regular basis).

Over the last few years he has:

- Cut down his own father after he hung himself, unable to cope any more with the pain he was in from cancer.
- Returned his niece home after a day out only to find her mother (his sister) dead in bed.
- And, most recently, helped his distraught neighbour cut down his wife after she had hung herself following a serious bout of depression. Then watched as his girlfriend tried CPR for 20 minutes, to no avail.

BTW, what’s with the unrelenting grimness of these last few weeks’ questions? Can we expect a return to shagging and shit next week?
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:34, 5 replies)

...
Whilst on holiday with the lads i witnessed - from about 10 metres away - A lad fall from a 10th story balcony. Oh how we laughed (not really at all. I had nightmares for about a year after)

We have gone from boring to touching on the ipswich serial killer side with the QOTW's?
(three inches of snarling death, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:28, Reply)

If your looking for funny, move along...
Just have to say, although my a-typical lurker status probably discounts my opinion, this QOTY is seriously lacking in chances at amusing story / anecdote / made up bullshit.

That said...I used to work in the Army (Regt etc etc unimportant) and was in Iraq approx 1 week before the start of the conflict a few years back, for about 11 months. Being attached to a medical supply unit (making sure the hospitals had blood, plasma and the like) I saw my fair share (and them some) of bodies / parts / random pools of unidentifiable claret. Suffice to say you cant see that kind of thing for months on end without:-

a) developing a sort of immunity to it, no matter how squeamish you were before and..
b) starting to really appreciate the good things you have when compared to these guys who are now dead/maimed/badly hurt mostly for reasons we dont totally understand or believe told to us by our respective governments.

There is no specific story im going to tell here so appologies to the gore seekers amongst you, just kind of wanted to say my piece and have done with it.

Oh, and one last note...when meeting someone / finding out someone was in forces / Iraq / Kuwait / etc etc...be aware that, for the most part, nothing says "im a cunt" like opening your conversation with "so, did you kill anyone / see any dead people".

Anyway, post over, heres hoping to a better subject next week when i can attempt to redeem myself with stories of hillarity and mirth to rival that of the infamous Legless himself :)

Ill be back.
(ReaperTG will appear behind your headboard on..., Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:23, Reply)

Three... tho nearly 4
The first was my gran. I watched her die in hospital - literally take her last breaths. She didn't want to go & kept on calling for me & my mother to pull her back. She told us to take hold of her arms and legs and pull.. If anyone had come into the room, I hate to think what would have happened. Me on pulling her legs, mum pulling on her arms, gran shouting "pull harder, pull harder, I don't want to go". Grim at the time, but oddly funny now. When she finally died, it was almost an anticlimax. She just breathed in deeply, and then that was it. I kept on waiting for her to wake up/move, but she didn't. My mum left the room to call the nurse and I got the collywobbles - it was eerie that 2 minutes ago she'd been there, and now she wasn't.

The second was my sister-in-law. She was lovely. Died when she was 5 months pregnant. As she was Muslim, the burial was pretty sharpish afterwards. We took her home to wash her body (I helped). What was most distressing is that being in a 3rd world country, there was no way of saving the baby, so it died with her. I was sure when we washing her, I could see her tummy move. It was probably my imagination but it's haunted me ever since.

The third was my other half's father. He died of cancer and I went to say goodbye. I could barely recognise him - he was literally a skeleton when he died. I remembered him as a big burly chap. An absolute shock.

The fourth "almost" On a lighter note. Me & my chums were walking home from school on a v hot summer's day. Saw a bloke flat out on his face in a garden, next to a lawn mower. We figured he'd had a heart attack and so stood for ages wondering what to do. Eventually, one of us threw a stick at him. He woke up. D'oh! Still, at least we cared enough to check!

No apologies for length, but a peck for grimness. Not a happy topic. Sighs.
( parttimebabe is almost there..., Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:22, 1 reply)

Aye, I have, lad...
I mind the time I were in a steamer, heading up the Suez Canal with a bunch of dirty bedouins.

Word was that the Egyptians had a work-force 30,000 strong digging out that son of a bitch...and it was up to us poor bedraggled bunch of motherless bastards to incite a revolution.

The sun was as blood, seeping into the horizon. Soon night would fall. I was cleaning my cock with rum, having recently plundered the cabin boy's gully creek. The air was so thick you could chew it.

I climbed up on deck and turned my eyes to the distance. Squinting against the last streaks of sickly sunlight, I made out an army, the shadow of each man stretching across the desert. Trudging across the sand..they could almost be ants. But dirty great ants with shovels. This was not going to be easy. There was something in the way they walked....shambling...stumbling... as if they were dead already.

When a man has nothing to live for, he has nothing to fight for. Darkness fell. An icy sweat broke out across my furrowed forehead and my anus puckered. Someone had to turn these men...these animals into soldiers...or all was lost.

But in the end I did and we won, and when I got home I put on the telly and saw Dr Gunther Von Hagen dissecting some old dead bloke.
(Jimbotfu Bummed in the gob again, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:19, Reply)

Not a dead body but.....
About 20 heads on spikes in two rows

i didn't think it would bother me but i did feel a bit queasy afterwards, was probably the smell of the embalming fluids.
(Batemonkey, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:18, Reply)

My first dead body
as i've mentionned in posts before, i'm a student nurse. I was lucky enough to not have to deal with a dead body until the very end of my first year.
It was a patinet who had been trasnferred to our ward just for TLC as he died. He had been poorly for a very long time with an endocrine disease wich involved escess production of bile.
Now, when a patient is dying, the are given a given a combination of morphine (pain control, diazepam (anti anxiety) and an anti emetic to stop the patient throwing up (this is important for later)
This patient had been with us for about two dies when he died and he chose to do it at the same time as another patient, so the nursing team were devided up as to who would lay out the bodies and who would stay on the ward. As they knew i had never laid out a body before they used it as an oppurtunity to teach me.
so we got everything ready, got on our gloves and aprons and went into the room.
It really didn't look as bad as i thought, he just looked like he was asleep. so we opened all the windows (bit of nursing superstition, lets the soul out) and set to washing him.
I was really comfortable washing him so i just stood by the head ready to assist with rolling him.
So his front got washed and we all assumed position to roll him onto his side to wash his bag and insert the body bag underneath him.
As i mentionned earler the patietn hadn't been able to throw up while he had been dying, so when we rolled the body towards me, the excess bile his body produced came out of his mouth and covered me. I've been thrown up on several times in my training, but this was horrible. This bile has been sitting inside of him for days and it reeked.
So needless to say i screamed and had to run out of the room and scrub myself clean.
I've yet to lay out another body, but if i do i'm not going near the head.
(minsh, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:17, Reply)

May 10th, 1993
My Dad died after a surprisingly short battle with cancer. Whether he started off with throat cancer which then took hold in his spine, or the other way round (more likely, because he'd been complaining of back pain for about a year before) probably isn't that important, but it spread very quickly. In the last couple of months of his life, he lost weight until he was roughly half his normal weight.

I was quite surprised to see him when he died, though. He looked so much healthier once he was dead - relaxed, mostly. He looked a bit grey, but he really did look better than he had in months. I know that might sound a bit sick, but it's really true.

I still miss him, but I'm glad he wasn't that ill for long.

Apologies for the length, and lack of length joke.

Oh, and dead animals? Dozens. Possibly hundreds. Growing up on a farm will do that. robably the worst was a new-born foal that had somehow slipped under a fence, down a bank, into the river at the bottom and died. You can't tell me we're just anthropomorphising animals and projecting human emotions onto them - I can only describe the poor mare as looking grief-stricken.
(gordonjcp, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:15, 1 reply)

DB's
Our office overlooks a stretch of river which is Tidal, flowing one way at morning then at some point during the day flowing the other.

As such we've seen all sorts of interesting things float by. Then sometimes an ambulance turns up in our car park to fish something/someone out.

We now have a pair of binoculars on the window sill behind me and at first sight of a floater we zoom in to check out the action and decide if it's a "DB" (dead body).

So far we've had a cow, a sofa, armchairs, beer kegs, polystyrene, tyres and all manner of other junk.... but the day there was a body we couldn't see it. Think it washed up further upstream.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:14, Reply)

oh - and another
This one is rank.

A friend told me once of being sent over to grannies house as his mum hadn't heard anything for a day or two. He let himself ni and did a tour of the ground floor to find no-one. He went up stairs and as his eye level cleared the top stair he found him self staring at his grannies face.

She had taken a tumble and, apparently, hit her head on the radiator. The real kicker, the bit that really makes this story awful was that she had somehow managed to 'rip her eye out' (as he put it, whilst shuddering. Some 15 years after it happened).

He still feels sick on a reasonably regular basis becuase of this, being one of those awful awful moments that you can't help but recall when you are feeling a little weakened/down...
(Shifty weeeee, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:12, Reply)

Attention all nurses!!
I have heard that peoples faces sometimes glow when they die, and that angels are routinely spotted sitting at the end of people's beds.

Is this true!?

Sorry for no story. I saw a dead body being burnt in Varanasi, and his face looked like the one on Indiana Jones who "chose poorly". This year I'm going to Vegas.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:04, 4 replies)

Not a whole one
I've not seen a dead body, just a bit of one.

As kids we used to hang around the local woods, climbing trees, trashing our bikes trying to jump over logs etc. There was often something interesting to find that had been dumped in the woods, so we were quite used to finding plastic bags and opening them up to see if there was anything worth playing about with. Good, innocent fun, apart from this one big plastic bag we found near the old ruined tower that everyone said was haunted. One of us gave it a bit of a kick and it rolled to the side heavily and settled back to where it was, but not before letting out a rancid, rotting flesh smell. We timidly opened the bag, slowly peeling back the plastic, scared of what we were going to find. Our first glimpse seemed innocent enough - a brownish orange coloured bit of cloth, so more of the bag was pulled back, only to expose a pair of large, cold, lifeless eyes staring up at us from a head... of a giraffe!

What? Nowhere in the question does it mention "human"! It turned out to belong to the guy restoring the tower near by. He's a taxidermist.
( SteamedCleaner, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:02, Reply)

Yes...
...several times. I was lucky enough to be sent to India by my fucking awful employers (Norwich Union - bunch of useless twats).

I actually had a wonderful time, 3 months of living like a king, rinsing the expenses and making sure that the locals that we had employed had a fucking ace time on the company $$$ before it all went tits up and they got given the heave-ho with out a reference or any kind of come back (thats the way it goes - you might not like offshoring but its the guys over there who have it REALLY bad).

Anyway - Indian driving is hilarious (in a kind of disorganised confusion havok kind of way) until you start to see the bodies piling up.Mainly young men on motorcycles headless,armless,crashing into the back of lorry's,being rammed off the road and generally in a fucking state (especially the poor cyclist who was pedalling away down the road when a lorry went past, catching an over head cable, which fell down and pretty much cut him in two).

It was pretty horrible for my middle class white ass from the sticks who'd never seen anything worse than an old fella falling off a bicycle.

Apologies for language!
(Shifty weeeee, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 13:01, Reply)

Lots
I've been in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and recently in the Rift Valley of Kenya so seen plenty. Not only through violence, also commonplace on the roads throughout Africa. To be honest after the first few it doesn't shock any more, though no matter how complacent you get, a kid's body always fucks you up.
Anyway as anyone will tell you the things about decomposing bodies is not the sight (after a few days they look more like one of those peat bog cavemen, strangely inoffensive), but the smell. I reckon now my nose is so fine-tuned I could stand in for that dog in Jersey.
Last year I was in a garden party in Sarf London, near Clapham Junction, and I swore I could smell a corpse. No-one else could, some mocked me and said it was drains or that I was too pissed. Two frigging months later workmen on the railway track at the back of the house found a suicide, been there about a year. Cheers, Network Rail.
(mzungu, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:56, 1 reply)

I saw my dead best friend
Last year he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Shropshire coming home after the Swancote biker meet.

I went to see him at the chapel of rest and put my hand on his as i said goodbye, it was cold (as expected) but not a "normal" kind of cold, it literally was a deathly cold and it was the single most awful experience of my life and something i dont wish to repeat anytime soon, he looked peaceful though despite the horrific accident and lingering death he had to endure.

Myself, along with two other friends and his brother were the pallbearers at his funeral.

i'll never forget it, and i'll never forget him.

He was only 19.
(The Reverend annoying the regulars since, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:51, Reply)

My first stiff.
I guess it was about 1990 or so. I had been in the Fire Brigade for a couple of years and hadn't seen a dead body yet. One night we got a call to a "concern for welfare" at a nearby highrise residential complex.

On arrival at the address, we found a few bags of shopping outside the door, where they had been left by the local shops delivery person earlier that day. After forcing the front door, we discovered that the light in the flat didn't work, and while we were discussing who was going in to look for the occupant, I felt a hand in the middle of my back, got shoved roughly through the door into the darkness, and had the door pulled shut behind me.

Now that was a bit stressful for a young guy not long in the job, but not as bad as when I turned my torch on and shone it around the flat to discover the occupant sitting upright on the lounge chair eyes wide open, and covered in blood from the throat all down the front of her body! Obviously she had had her throat slashed by some insane murderer, who was probably still in there waiting for their next victim. As I frantically tried to open the door to escape the madman, the door wouldn't budge and all I could hear was my workmates giggling like fucking schoolgirls on the outside, holding the door shut! I backed into the nearest corner and swung the torch around looking for the murderer who was going to kill me, when the door opened and in walked two ambo's who walked over the the murder victim, quickly checked for signs of life and instantly concluded that the "murder victim" had died after a stomach ulcer had ruptured and bled out. Thank Christ! I wasn't going to die at the hands of a physcopathic knife murderer, well not that night anyway. I've seen quite a few since then, but none stuck in my head like my first.
(Firemansam, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:47, Reply)

In Ghana this summer
Went to the funeral of some bloke's grandmother, just to see what it would be like. Not what one would call a somber affair: everybody visits the body for a minute, goes out again and sits down.
Outside there are loads of chairs, a church choir, a band of drummers, several hundred people, good food, a DJ and the mourners. The guy who took me later said: "I only go to the funerals because I am allowed to get drunk there".
It's incredible: everyone is dancing around the coffin which is now set up i the middle of the courtyard, the music is happy and fast, the choir sings some sad songs, the sister runs to the coffin and collapses in tears, is dragged away, more dancing around the coffin and finally it gets taken to the grave. Of course, the village doesn'T have a hearse so they use the ambulance, a battered old Tata van with blue lights on top and no door for the boot.

Seeing the body wasn't anything special and didn't affect me at all for some reason. Maybe it had been the two drinks of very powerful local gin beforehand that had numbed the pain...
( morrybyte made a subtle namechange at, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:45, Reply)

Beside the usual uncle / grandma bodies
I one saw a couple of bodies floating in a river in Sri Lanka, while were crossing a small bridge over a jungle stream.
Our driver grinned apologetically and told us they were swimming.

Oh...and last time on the beach, there was a dead baby seal
( mediocre ha ha ha, you're reading this, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:39, Reply)

I have, but I'll turn the spotlight on my mate first...
My mate Dave was returning from a training course in Cheltenham a few years back. As he entered (oo-er missus) Cheltenham railway station, he was witness to some poor, suicidal sod stepping off the platform in front of an oncoming freight train as it rumbled through. Apparently the guy’s body was torn apart and his arms and legs ended up at various points along the next 100 yards or so of track.

Now Dave is a lovely bloke (and responsible for me meeting the sweary one), and saw a family heading across the bridge to the same platform. Seeing that there were two very young children in tow, he decided to have a word. “I would turn around if I were you”, he advised the mother, “there’s been an accident and it’s a bit messy”.

“Fuck off” said the mother (or words to that effect) “we’ve got a train to catch and we’re running late”. He tried to explain, but the woman barged past with her kids, and off down the steps. Dave shrugged a ‘don’t say I didn’t try’ kind of shrug, and headed off to make a phone call to his missus to tell her he was going to be extremely late home that night.

Thirty seconds later an hysterical scream echoed through the station as the family were confronted by a torso-less head staring up at them.

Grim.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:36, 5 replies)

Oh dear, does it count if the body isn't human?
One of our family cats, Miss Marple, died a couple of years ago of kidney failure aged 15. Can I just say now that if the vet tells you that it's at an advanced stage, think very hard about keeping your cat alive. We did, in the summer, and it was awful. I think she suffered needlessly, and yet I stupidly clung on to the idea that she could somehow live for ever.

Imagine a cat not reacting to smoked salmon being dangled in front of it, and drinking (not alcohol) all the time because she pisses herself every 30 minutes - water passes straight through her. She lies around all day in the bathroom (coldest place) and even the other cat, her son, who basically hates her and has attacked her every day for 14 years, leaves her and her food alone. And this despite the fact that he happily eats the dog food. He knew she was dying, and gave her the peace she wanted near the end.

So eventually putting her down, something we'd put off for a week, was the only real option. First, the vet sedates her, and she fights the drug for what seems like ages. She was conscious for longer than most cats the vet had ever seen apparently - Mimi really was a fighter, especially against drugs (we found this out when we moved house and she resisted the sleeping pills. MIAOW for 8 hours in the car). To watch her slowly lose was a painful thing to see, and all this time she was looking straight at me with massively dilated pupils. I couldn't look away, and remembering that look haunts me to this day. It looks accusing and completely devoid of life.
When the vet injected the poison or whatever it is, she passed without pain and completely at peace. But with open eyes.
It was the end of a horrible lass month alive for her, which had begun when I arrived back from boarding school. She was very cuddly in those last weeks of her life, which she hadn't really been. I don't know what could have been done if we'd noticed her illness earlier, but what's done is done. My dad likes to say she held out until I came back, and now I'm fucking bawling my eyes out as I write it. I'd love that to be true. And I can't stop thinking about those eyes!

*takes break, breathes deeply*

sorry for length etc, but 15 years isn't too bad. She'd been there since I was 3 years old.
( morrybyte made a subtle namechange at, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:34, 18 replies)

lots and lots
*nurse in intensive care unit



(not a very interesting story i know)
(feed me toffee revels now, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:28, Reply)

Lots and Lots
My Papa was a funeral director so I seen loads of bodies at his work.

I found a guy floating in the river Clyde, his torso was chalk white, his shirt over his head and he was floating vertically in the water, From TV dead bodies always float horizontally don't they?
In reality his boots weighed his legs down.

I found it a weird experience, I waited for the police to come, pointed out the body, gave my name and left.
(Andy-Bhoy I'm here all week, try the veal., Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:27, Reply)

Seen one, kissed one, no problems
Nothing pervy in it, but got to say goodbye to Gran before they shut the casket and gave her a kiss on the cheek as I had every time I met her when alive.
(paxvobiscum, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:26, Reply)

It was the first time and the last time
I haven't seen a dead body but your mothers may as well have been dead, she lay there lifeless as I pounded my meat into her, didn't even make a noise, her glassy eyes staring at the ceiling, maybe it was the rohypnol, maybe it was the smack, all I know is that she was begging for it, the dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty bitch.

.....the haziness of that evening is now coming back to me, your mother may well have been dead as i pounded my meat truncheon into her time and again, my large heavy gonads thwapping against her undercarriage.......

....she had approached me in a bar earlier that evening, 'Do I know you' she said, 'Not as well as you will know me later on' I replied with a nonchalant smile and flick of my hair. Her perfume was intoxicating, and her ruby red lips glistened under the spotlights shining on the bar. I offered to get her a drink, which she readily accepted. We chatted about many things, it turned out we were from the same town and had been to the same school, all-be-it I had been a few years her junior. We also skirted around the topic of under performing schools and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I told her how i once had shat myself after straining so hard to do a fart that my cheeks went beetroot red.
We continued on and had many more drinks and were eventually asked to leave by the bar staff after they closed up. We stumbled outside, and upon hitting the fresh air I hailed her a taxi and sent her on her way home, sometimes i still remember that night with fond memories, the carousel, the big wheel, candy floss by the bonfire, with the guy alight atop. the sweet smell of chestnuts roasting and the laughter of children as they danced and skipped around the motionless crowd, watching the fireworks as they made the most beautiful colours and displays in the night sky. The food was particularly good as well, pumpkins and furry eggs washed down with a sweet golden warm glass full of urine.....

......I waited for her on the subway but she did not come, I waited for her at the station, and still she did not appear. Then suddenly, every little piece of my heart tied up in knots and I was in heaven. The message that was transpiring through the precipitation was more and more lucid as the haziness lifted and the sunshine spilt over the edge and illuminated the bonjela tube balanced precariously.....

.....her body was cold by the time I finished pounding and emptied my seed into her, I withdrew and told her I loved her. She didnt reply, I thought she would prefer it if I left. I stroked her hair, which fell off her head in large clumps such was the ferocity of my lovemaking and kissed her cheek bidding her farewell. I knew this would be the last time we would see each other, yet she hid her emotion well, like a corpse hiding any signs of life. I walked to the door, turned round and shouted over at her 'Jusqu'à ce que nous rencontrons encore, mon bien-aimé chéri, pouvoir notre amour notre toujours bond sur les océans et est tombé des arbres. '

The End
(little lord muthafuckin fauntleroy, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:18, 10 replies)

The frisbee
A small group of us used to go to the chippy at lunchtime from school, and one day we were delighted to find that it had been snowing, so snowball fights were had en route. Anyway, on our way back we saw some girls from our year ahead of us, so naturally we started to throw chips at them, hoping to get the maximum score of a zillion points by landing one inside a hood. This continued for a few minutes, until one of us spotted a dead hedgehog, lying beneath a thin covering of snow, frozen solid. It didn't take too much persuasion for one of our number to pick it up and hurl it like a frisbee at the girls. I think Hazel screamed, but not as much as the time I sprayed Tizer all over her blouse.

Okay, okay, so it's not a human body, but it is a body after all. See?
(nasalhair The Twix guy!, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:16, Reply)

An ordinary tragedy
I remember it being nice and warm – one of those early summer nights when you can hear people chatting in their gardens and mowing their lawns. There were some of those midges or flies or whatever they are in the air, those little clouds of hazy insects which look like solidified heat. My father died in August; was it early in that summer, or was it the summer before? He was ill for three years. My instinct is that it was the year before he died. That would be 1998. My mother’s friend Fiona and her husband Eric brought him and my mother to hospital in their stupid people carrier car (although they have four children, so perhaps it was fair enough). I remember that desperate pounding up and down of stairs which usually accompanies a death or a birth. No-one really told us what was going on, but I didn’t mind then, and I don’t mind now. Now I realise everyone was too busy getting my dad to hospital to fill us in, and then I was just glad because I knew I wouldn’t have to do any homework and could play on the N64. It was definitely a school night, probably a Tuesday or Wednesday. I really fucking hate Tuesday. Has anything good, ever, happened to anyone on a Tuesday?

Apparently my father’s stent had filled with bile, and it was choking him. A stent is a small tube, usually made of metal or plastic, which can be used to bypass a blockage in someone’s body. I think this stent was bypassing his bile duct, which the tumour had started to strangle. It then filled up with bile itself. (At the time, this struck me as a fairly self-evident design flaw; what would stop it from filling up straight away? I’m sure there’s a good answer to that question, formulated by someone cleverer than myself.) I remember the four adults roaring off in the people carrier, and all I could think about was what a good excuse this would be at school the next day for not having done my homework. I’d like to tell you that I feel bad about having thought that, but I don’t. The thing about my father being so ill for so long was that it became normal; it really wasn’t a big deal. When he finally died all I felt was a kind of detached curiosity. I wanted to see how things would pan out, how people would react, and I wanted to witness death and bereavement up close. In his very last few days there was some sort of nurse woman there the whole time, just sitting by his bed. I’ve no doubt she was extremely highly trained, but it struck me as an easy (if depressing) job. Either she came and woke me up, or my mum did, early on the 1st of August, 1999, to tell me that he had died. He looked exactly the same dead, although in truth he’d been a withered shell of a man for months and months beforehand anyway. His arms and legs were like tinder wrapped in grey cloth, and his stomach had swollen (I don’t know why). My mum was surprisingly calm. I sat on the bed next to him, not because I wanted to say goodbye but because I wanted to touch a dead body. He was still warm, but even sitting with him for a few minutes I could feel him cooling. Cooling finally; absolutely. It reminded me of a Lego ghost I used to have as a child. The ghost was a completely black Lego man over which you fitted a white ghost sheet thing. If you left it out under a light for a while, the shell would absorb the light, and would then glow in the dark when you switched the light off. I would leave the ghost out under the light for hours, in the hope that it would glow all night, but I would usually wake up at some point to find my ethereal companion had spent his small supply of light. It wasn’t a scary ghost. Lego ghosts are quite friendly – the kind who are just lonely, and would like some friends to play with, but don’t have any because everyone is too afraid to get to know them.

I also reached over to my father’s face and opened his eyes. I can’t remember what they looked like – I wanted to see if simply passing my hand lightly over his face would close his eyes, as I had seen in so many war and cowboy films. I think it worked, but my mother asked me to stop. I’ve no idea where the nurse woman had gotten to. My mum also went and told my brother, but I’m not sure if he ever saw the body; he went into his room and closed the door, and stayed there for a day or so. You know how sometimes, a door is closed, and you just know not to open it? You know that whoever is in the room really doesn’t want you in there? That’s what my brother’s bedroom door was like on the day my father died. The undertakers came and brought with them this ridiculous plastic coffin thing (it actually bent) to put my father in. I think it even had really long fabric straps, like a holdall. They put my father into it – large, sweating men, beefily shovelled into scratchy black suits on a sweltering August morning – and began to bring him downstairs. My brother’s room was at the top of the stairs, and to manoeuvre the coffin/Tupperware thing round the corner one of the undertakers opened my brother’s room. I imagine that might have upset him, seeing the end of his father’s coffin poke into his bedroom for a second or two before disappearing again. My mother very quickly asked the undertakers not to open that door.

My father’s sister and her family arrived later on that day. They had been on holiday in Spain and had had to cut the break short to come to England. Were his two other brothers there already? I don’t think so. I remember they had come for a few weeks that Easter, but I don’t think either of them got there until the next day. I was glad my cousin Fiona was there, as we went for cigarettes together. I was also glad that I had a cast-iron excuse for not going in to work at McDonalds. However, I quickly grew tired of the whole thing. The sitting around, the constant stream of people I had no interest in coming to the house, particularly the people who had made no effort to see him while he was ill. There was a funeral in Newmarket, then another, along with the burial, in Athenry. The mechanics of transporting a body from one country to another were as tedious and grinding as you might imagine. I was sick of being told to be strong for my mother; I don’t remember anyone actually offering me their condolences. Eager to spread some of my pain around, I refused to talk to one of my friends who had not mentioned the death, until he sent a card expressing his regret. It felt good to hurt someone – I knew that he hadn’t said anything because he didn’t know what to say, not out of callousness. I just wanted someone else to suffer.
Some years the anniversary passes, and I don’t even realise. When I do remember I phone my mother. Ideally, when I remember I try to act withdrawn and moody all day so that someone will ask me what’s wrong, and I can tell them and elicit sympathy. Not that I enjoy sympathy, or feel like I can do anything with it. Probably the best year was when I had just been dumped by a girl I was in love with – the first girl I had ever been in love with – and on the anniversary she texted me asking how I was. (She didn’t know about the anniversary; perhaps it was some small crumb of bitter reward from the fates?) I replied, gleeful and spiky with hatred, that I wasn’t that good, actually, as it was the anniversary of my dad’s death. I didn’t give a shit about the anniversary, but it was a great opportunity to a) make her feel sorry for me and b) try and hurt her. She immediately rang me, and I put the phone down on her. I take it you don’t want to talk to me, she texted. Don’t ever contact me again, I replied. Her response was more than I could have hoped for – texts, emails, letters, all of which I ignored. I felt like Achilleus, eating his heart out by the seashore. I think at that point – just after doing my A Levels – I had a job as a waiter, so I was free all day to seethe against this girl. Spending countless hours of that blazing summer in my room staring at the ceiling. Pissing away all that heat and light and time. It was fucking brilliant, and it was also one of the worst times of my life. Of course after a while (a fairly short while) she stopped trying to contact me; being pretty, and intelligent, and friendly, she was in demand, while I was not (I know, I have no idea either). But she would later tell me in a letter that she went to university “not able to trust people because of you”, so I take some comfort from that. Why does it feel so good to hurt people? Why does it feel so good to get hurt? As a child, I could never understand songs and books which talked about the pleasure in pain. It seemed silly and self-defeating to enjoy situations which were painful. Then you get a bit older, and you start to experience some of these things for yourself, and you realise that getting hurt does feel good. Maybe, as well, it’s necessary to take pleasure from pain, simply because so much of life is made of up of it. What do you get, honestly, from a life? Huge, yawning chasms of tedium and boredom, punctuated by occasional spikes of despair and pain and even rarer hillocks of pleasure. Little foothills of fun and enjoyment which are soon bulldozed flat by the endless grey monotony of life in general.
(pk1982, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:15, 4 replies)

Skulls. Lots and lots of skulls.
The Killing Fields, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. November last year.

I'm assuming most of you will know about the Khmer Rouge's period of rule from 1975 to 1979. Around 2 million Cambodians were killed, many of them having been tortured horrendously first.

On the edge of Phnom Penh, there is a little suburban village called Choeung Ek, where the most famous of the 'killing fields' is situated.

On the day we went, it was a beautiful, clear and sunny day. Hot, just a hint of a breeze: it was perfect weather. Our car drew into the carpark, and we were led to a large 'stupa' (mausoleum), with glass sides. There was something pale inside, but we couldn't tell what it was until we got closer.
They were skulls. Hundreds upon hundreds of skulls, taken from the mass graves surrounding the stupa, piled on top of each other, filling the entire stupa from floor to ceiling. Some still had dirt on, many were missing their jawbones, and most of them were damaged: there were jagged holes in almost every one, from where the victims were killed by having their heads stoved in with hammers, axes, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. Bullets were considered an unnecessary expense, when there were cheaper ways of killing.
Underneath all of these skulls were various clothes that had been pulled from the mass graves: work shirts, boiler suits, blouses, dungarees. Clothes that belonged to normal people, who wore them to work, rest or go to school in.

One could also walk around the fields, and see where the mass graves had been excavated. Some were unisex, some were for women or men only. The hardest one to look at was a smaller pit, for young children and babies. It was next to a gnarled old tree, upon which is a sign explaining that the children buried in this pit tended to be swung by the ankles against the tree, until their heads broke open. They were then unceremoniously thrown in, some still alive. The smallest babies they would throw up into the air, and impale them on more sharpened bamboo canes.

Walking along the paths, there are fragments of bone sticking up, and sometimes the occasional piece of cloth, from a body that hasn't yet been excavated. That was the worst part, walking around on these bits of bone and clothes, unable to avoid them because they were so numerous. The air was heavy with scent from nearby trees and the smell of freshly-cut grass. We could hear insects buzzing and crickets chirping. However, despite the heat, I felt horribly cold. It was the most upsetting place I have ever been. The knowledge that human beings can kill their own, so very easily, and in such heinous ways, is hideous, and that day will stay vividly in my mind for the rest of my life.

Serious apologies for length, but I can't get across the horror of seing those skulls and bone fragments in a few short sentences.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 12:14, 5 replies)