Trauma In the Casket

The most important thing I learned as a result of my grandmother’s death was that as a seven year old boy the worst thing you can possibly do at a funeral is look into the coffin. What you see just might traumatize you as it did to me.
The year was 2005, the location was Jamaica. The army needed my mother in Iraq and my father’s grandmother had died. My dad was very close to his grandmother, she basically raised him with the help of his mother. So when he learned she had died we immediately packed up our stuff and retreated to father’s home country for a couple weeks. I suppose this journey had a lot to do with both seeing family and going to the funeral because we stayed in Jamaica a week and a half or two before the funeral even occurred and we were still there a week or so after the funeral. This, of course, made sense, my dad hadn’t seen Jamaica for many years by that point. So the extended trip kind of made something good out of a tragic situation.
Dreariness flooded the air on the day of the funeral, for everyone else there, as merely a child I didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation and I didn’t remember her to well even though my father says she used to look after me, before I actually remembered much, when we were both still lived Jamaica and he had to be out.
I remember being incredibly bored during the ceremony before we went to bury her, they played gospel songs I had heard only a thousand times and droned on with speeches that were pointless to me and the dark, tense atmosphere made me very sullen that day. However, the day got much darker and a bit less boring (but much more terrifying) for me when the burial began. It was an open coffin funeral meaning right before they lowered her into the ground we all had a chance to see the body if we so wanted. I remember barreling through the crowed because I was very curious to see this women that everyone seem to know so well and that I supposedly known at one point, but attempting to see the body was a mistake of mine. I went up there and stared down at the body and became instantaneously drowned in dread. That was the first time I had seen a dead body but after that day, for many months, I saw that face anytime I closed my eyes.
Today I believe I was so scared of the body I had seen because It reminded me of our mortality and then I feared death much more than I do today but eventually I was able to come to terms with the fact that one day everything must perish and I was able to welcome her face in my dreams before I eventually was able to completely let go of all the negativity that came with seeing her.