My Life with Corpses - Excerpt

Even so, I had some notion early on that all was not as it should be in my family. I specifically do not say, please note, that I felt the wrongness. That is just the point. There was no feeling, or very little. It is well known that dead people do not feel, either tactilely or in their hearts -- by which I mean "emotions." I was not dead so I suppose I could have felt something, but I was like the wolf boy. Who could expect him to stride man, fully on his two legs when all he saw around him were four-legged beasts? He would eventually come to something like that, perhaps, but why should it ever occur to him to do it in the beginning?

But I am straying from my purpose, which is to sit here and to write down, in an orderly fashion, "what it is like" to be raised by corpses. I choose to do this now for selfish reasons. I am often besieged with questions about my upbringing by the curious or even by professional persons interested in making me an object of their research. Leaving my office today and putting my dog Maggie in the car, I was again approached by a total stranger intent on eliciting some previously untold information from me. My hope is that if I set it all down here for everybody to see and digest at leisure, these constant and disturbing probes will mostly cease. If so, my most pressing concern and burden will be made lighter. I need to concentrate now and to concentrate I must be left alone much of the time. If I do not concentrate -- and I am convinced absolutely that this is so -- I will die.

Copyright © 2004 Wylene Dunbar

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