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My mom's family traditionally has open-casket funerals, so I've seen some dead relatives. Somehow with them sitting in a coffin, all neatly dressed and made up, it just doesn't seem real. I remember my great-grandmother didn't look like herself at all, and my 5-year-old mind made up all sorts of great conspiracy theories. Aunt Dot didn't look like herself. Neither did Unkle Ferd or Aunt Ruth.
When I saw my grandfather's body in the emergency room, about ten minutes after his death, though, that was the real thing. It was the second time he'd been brought to the emergency room, after several years of kidney dialysis and general ill health. The first time we were told to hurry down there as he may not make it, and arrived to find him eating pudding and giving his nurses hell. So when we got the second call, my mom and I sort of rolled our eyes and moseyed out of the house.
When we got to the hospital, we found grandma sitting on a bench outside the emergency room smoking a cigarrette and crying. We'd just missed him, by a few minutes. Together the three of us held each other, me, my mother, and my grandmother. We let grandma finish her smoke, and we went back into his room in the ER (the same room where I'd had my broken arm set, years and years earlier). The main thing I remember was that his jaw was hanging slack. Grandma tried to close his mouth, but it kept hanging open.
I think I was 14 or 15. It completely changed how I saw life and mortality. I gave up that teenage invincibility thing right there. It's not really fair to say that I "got careful" or started behaving more responsibly, but I was always aware of the worst-case consequences of whatever reckless actions I took.
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