What Is A Dead Human?

This morning I was reading an essay by Dr. Taylor Worley where he is discussing Amid Crépon’s thoughts on how the many images of death that occur in popular media has desensitized us to death itself.  Crépon says that one way this is evident is that media never addresses what you do with a dead body.  I have never thought this thought, but have been faced with that life experience.  My dad died as I was getting ready to go see him.   I knew he was close to death and I had tried for months to be with him every weekend.  When I got the call, I immediately knew, even though his Him, my dad, was no longer on our earth, his body was. I needed desperately to be with it, to see it, to tell it goodbye before the morgue had its chemical modernity way.  I needed the primal feel and view of his flesh, that old gnarled body that had carried my dad so faithfully for so many years.  I literally raced across the great state of Tennessee to “be with” his body.  I will never forget standing in the morgue alone with it/him, as it/him was lying naked on a massive slab of thick white marble.  Some issues that flooded my soul can never be written but there are two that I can and I already have...Was my dad, as he was now on earth, an it and was that it/him naked or simply a most beautiful inanimate form?  One thing I still know is that it was the most beloved form I have ever seen.  

I came home and made this piece.