Thanks everybody

[urbpan]

Many thanks to all of you for you well wishes and sorrow. I'm fine, a little weirded out, and wondering if I'm going to have residual psycological problems (I don't feel traumatized...) but once I got to work it was just another day. It was kind of strange to be working on the halloween event and to be surrounded by halloween imagery (including my own mock grave)--but the difference between real life death and pretend halloween death is very clear. I never felt like "Oh my god, we can't have pretend death! There's real death out there!!" Halloween is still fun to me. I hope I don't feel weird about walking by that place in the river from now on, but I imagine I will.

I still feel bad for the family of the woman who died, and I wish I knew more about her. I googled her name (see the comments to my last post--they include a link to a short article) and came up blank. That in itself is almost the strangest part of this. Every name exists somewhere on the internet! But not hers. Her life is none of my business, but I feel like I should know something about it, because I discovered her just after she left it.

Well wishes to all of you, and thanks again.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

I think you're going about it right. I found a dead guy once, a day after Halloween, walking through a big cemetery with a friend. We were a little "whew!" at the time but I think that since we realized that the incident hadn't happened to us, but to the man (and his family and friends) it was not about us at all. We were just incidental witnesses, and – again like you – reporters of the event to the authorities. I never found out who he was, either; he was an older man who'd died naturally while cleaning up his family plot for winter, with some gardening tools around him, so there was no crime or suicide angle for the media to report.

[(Anonymous)]

My friend's son-in-law was taking a noon-time break to destress and went to a favorite hunting spot to check out a place for a tree-stand. He wasn't hunting, just trying to relax, when he found a body. He didn't look at it much, but it turned out to be a young man with a cocked revolver in his hand, who may or may not have committed suicide. The police took bootprints and tireprints of my friend's son-in-law, and needless to say the destressing jaunt ended up any but that. Time (a couple weeks) has passed and not much has come of it that I know of.

Hang in there.

Dwight