I opened the front door and there was the dead man. He was next to the steps. He was climbing the steps when his heart crashed. He fell backward, hit the landing hard, struggled, and surrendered. My brother found him. Paramedics tried to bring life back by repeatedly shocking the chest, but that and other procedures could not make it reemerge from the depths into which it had sunk. The dead man on the floor was my father. A white cloth was over his face. His hands were partially open and totally still.

Life left him in 10 minutes.

My brother, who lived with my father, sat on the top of the steps and two police officers stood next to the body. Both officers were young and strong-looking. The younger of the two, or at least he appeared to be younger, explained to me that, though no foul play was suspected, they would not leave my father’s house until the body was removed by a funeral home. It was the duty of the state to protect the body, to make sure nothing weird or unseemly happened to it. The body could no longer protect itself. It needed the presence of the state, the shield of strangers. The police served that function for the prone body.

For me, the officers were simply a rock for my profoundly shaken emotions to stand on. There is nothing worse than the death of someone you love. Indeed, your own death is horrible only because you are aware—before dying, before the nothingness—of the great sorrow your absence will bring to the ones who love you. When you see the dead body of a loved one, your mind is unhinged. The impossible is possible. The end is nothing but the end. In the face of this blunt fact, you either break down and weep or, as I did, find something hard to support you. Those young and broad-shouldered officers were not unfeeling, but they knew I needed their hardness and coolness to get through the most immediate part of this crisis—the dead body.

“Look, why don’t you take the family to your house?” said the younger officer (my cousins had arrived and were now comforting my brother). “We will watch your father. We won’t go anywhere until the funeral home comes. If anything happens, we will call you.” I found no reason to oppose this suggestion, gathered my senses for the final departure, and, before walking out the door with the family—before walking past the carved and demonic pumpkin that glowed beside the door and the fake cobwebs strewn on the ivy that climbed to the window of my father’s room, the upper room—I turned to his body on the floor, knelt beside it, and placed my living right hand onto the open dead right hand. It closed on me. For a strange moment, my hand felt the pressure of his reanimated and still-warm hand. This, of course, was a reflex, but it also had the ghost of a truth. If my father had been alive, his hand, under the control of his mind, would have done the very same thing—lovingly closed on my hand. recommended

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

42 replies on “Warm Corpse”

  4. The last two sentences are the most beautiful I have ever read in reference to a deceased loved one.

    Hands, even more then faces, are central to our experience of the people we connect with.

    In an introductory anatomy class, a prerequisite for nursing school, I took the hand of the cadaver in order to reposition the arm. In all the time I spent with that body, nearly 10 hours a week for 18 weeks, the first moment after I took the stiff cold hand was the only moment when I felt that the body had been a human, had been a man.

    Even months after death, after gallons of preservative had been flushed through tissue and scalpels and bone saws had begun to peel back the tissue, that hand contained the ghost of passed humanity.

  9. Flood of tears. Charles, thank you for writing this.

    (And the way it was laid out in the actual newspaper, on a single page around the prominent graphic. Simply magnificent work by all involved.)

  10. What a beautiful tribute to the finality of an awful moment. Thank you for sharing this. I hope your family finds solace in the coming days.

  13. Charles you continue to be the finest of the stranger’s writing staff. Sometimes I think you’re the only one with any class at all at this lefty-rag, at least ever since Sandeep Kaushik left. (Or,maybe you’re just the only staff member that’s not a total pothead) I am continually amazed at your ability to stare into the abyss and not blink, & your capacity to write about it with such eloquence.

    My condolences to you and your family, and safe travels to your father on his journey home.

  19. Not the title I was expecting to read about?
    and as we don’t even know what life is for the most part death may very well be more the mystery than the nothing
    Its hard when superman dies and as it takes 4 months to find words to try to describe the death of from where and who and what you came from it may be just scratching the surface.
    So strange our memories can go so far back with some people.
    I wish you strength and love

  21. Charles, my father was seen as he fell and was reached in time. The paramedics’ electrical shocks stuttered his heart back into life.

    As soon as I could reach his hospital bedside I was there.

    “Alex!” he beamed at me as I walked in — oh, his crushed scabbed face; he had fallen forward, his nose was flattened, his front teeth gone — “I have to tell you! Dying doesn’t hurt! It didn’t hurt at all!”

    I believe it for myself. I hope that you can believe it for your father.

  22. I’m very sorry for your loss. You expressed it in a way that begins to capture to utter tragedy that is losing someone you love. Thank you for sharing this with us.

  26. Charles, in writing this piece, you have paid a beautiful tribute to your father’s unexpected passing, finding simple, aching poetry in this inexplicable event.

    Anyone who has lost a parent, for whatever reason, will feel something of what you are feeling now.

  27. Also, SHAME on poster #18 for writing that. If that soulless jerk is reading this, I’d like to ask him…Dude, the guy’s FATHER just died. What the hell is the matter with you? Does the word “inappropriate” mean ANYTHING to you? Go away. JUST go away.

  29. THANK YOU CHARLES.
    I just lost my father too, about 2 weeks ago. It was sudden and extremely painful, it still is…and I’m told it will be for a long, long time.
    I’m left with a mother who is in shambles and a useless brother who barely mentions him, let alone offers any support.
    I understand the needing to have an emotional rock to solidify you in a time where the emotional pain is so concentrated it feels physical.
    Having people who spoke calmly, without emotion helped me get through those first difficult days much more than the crying sympathizers.

    My sincerest condolences on your loss.

  31. Charles, I love your writing. Always. After recently losing my father, I just can’t seem to bring myself to read this. At least not at work. No waterworks at work.

  35. My father died of a heart attack in the middle of the night. No longer married, my sister who lived with him at the time, along with her son of 6 years, found him on a weekday morning. She went to wake him up because he was uncharacteristically still asleep on a work-day morning. It was a shock that I think still shakes her bones. After she yelled and cried and called 911 she had to go explain things to her son who was sitting in the kitchen waiting to go to school as paramedics entered the house. He responded to her: Sometimes in life these things happen.

    It’s hard for me to talk about him with people who never knew him. Their lack of knowledge of him inadvertently highlights the person he was in my life; who is no longer there.

    His person had a great deal of influence on the formative years of mine. I think everyone who knows me knows my father. It is when there are no longer traces of our influence that we truly die.

  36. Charles, I’m very sorry for your loss. This was an incredibly moving piece, and I thank you for sharing it in the midst of your grief.

  37. Oh, so moving and so profound, I immediately wept. Thank you so much for sharing. May your sense of loss be often overwhelmed by celebration of your father’s life.

  39. I usually don’t like your pieces, Charles, but sometimes you knock it out of the park. You have a gift for relaying complex emotions that I rarely appreciate.

    My sympathies for you and yours.

  40. Oh Charles, I’m so sorry. Losing a parent is awful. They stand between us and the abyss, and when they’re gone, there’s just the abyss. I’m copying those last two sentences into my journal, so when the time comes that I’ll need them, they will be there.

  42. May God bless you & yours, Charles. I just know your father had to have been real proud of you, one the best writers in the land. Thanks for sharing, buddy.

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