this isn't going to be very clear I think. Today I had to go to the doctor's office and afterwards my mom, her cousin and I went to my aunt's house to check if she had died following her suicide attempt or not. When we arrived, my mom's cousin looked at me, then at my mom and asked, "Do you think this-" (pointing at me) "-is a good idea?" I said it was. We went inside. My aunt was lying on the floor in the hall area leading from her living room to her kitchen, on her back, wearing a shirt and underpants. Her arms were at her side and her mouth was open wide. Her skin was discoloured, especially her fingers. She wasn't breathing, of course, but my mom still touched her leg just in case. She was cold.

The police were called and they arrived and took pictures of all of our passports and questioned us about how my aunt had died and whatnot. I say questioned 'us' but every question was intercepted by my mom's cousin, so in the end my mom and I maybe said a sentence each. She just kept babbling, and I swear she must have said "But we're happy for her, happy her suffering is finally over" about ten times. Always 'we' too, never asking if we actually agreed with it. She told the cops my aunt's entire life story while we waited for the forensics people and the detectives, and we weren't allowed to even go near the house's door anymore. They kept bursting in and out of tears. The detectives came and asked us the same questions again. During the waiting time one of the cops sort of weirdly said, to my mom, "I don't understand why you thought it was a good idea to take your child to such a place, a place where a body might be found, but okay, maybe it's personal to you" and I had to snap and say that it was actually my idea to come, because I wanted to support her. He dismissed this. The pathologists came and we had to leave and sit outside for two hours or something while they worked so we sat on a bench for a while and then went to get coffee that really sucked badly.

When we were called back the detectives were there and said the story my mom's cousin told checked out (aunt was severely suicidal, attempted tens of times over her life, we hadn't done anything to help her so we weren't suspect, no crime had been committed) and so the body was 'given free' meaning that we were allowed to call the crematory people to get her body taken away and cremated. More crying and stuff and then we went inside. they had undressed my aunt which made sense I guess since they had to check her for puncture marks or whatever, and after that they somewhat confusingly tucked her into the mattress-bed lying on the floor in the living room with one blackened hand folded over the blanket. Her neck had previously been angled differently but when they moved her it must have shifted because now she suddenly looked a lot more frightening. There was something off about the angle and her teeth were like a fringe-cut piece of paper, body not bloated as far as I could tell. Next to the mattress were several bowls full of pills, one of which with a spoon in it as well, alongside an untouched can of water. From the way it looked I have to assume she was eating the pills like dry cereal. She had a dress prepared to be cremated in, it was lying on the table she used to make us put our coats on when we came in to visit. The other two started cleaning the house a bit after finding a specific crematory service my aunt had bookmarked on her computer (I had to turn the computer on, face to face with my aunt's open-mouthed corpse. It's something about that open mouth, unnatural just like my grandma's had been when she died, that continues to haunt me. That and the hand, that singular blackened hand. Eventually it turned out the computer screen wasn't plugged in and the mouse was on the couch, meaning my mom had to hop over my aunt's body like some kind of morbid parkour level). After that they pretty much told me to go away and sit in the garden because I was only in the way. I sat there pretty long too and just kind of stress-vaped and drank a Monster Energy and kind of waited quietly, and I couldn't focus so I couldn't really do anything. They shared some stories with each other then, earlier too when we were outside, and it was all this kind of weird stuff to be laughing about like how my aunt apparently used to lay down in the middle of the road as a child and wait to be ran over, but instead police would always just pick her up and give her a ride home. I guess my mom's cousin wasn't kidding when she said my aunt had been trying to die her whole life. When they looked at photos together they never angled the phone screen towards me until I asked. At one point we were going over to my other aunt's house to use the bathroom (since we couldn't use the one in my aunt's house, of course, on account of the corpse) and my mom's cousin asked if I knew where my aunt lived, a question so baffling I didn't know what to tell her.

The mortuary guy came and he looked really similar to Bonehead, you know, the guy from Oasis, only he was wearing a stained shirt and was alone and not with a coworker like the mortuary people who picked up my grandma had been (possibly on account of this being a very cheap service?) He put my aunt on a stretcher and into a body bag-like thing and then wrapped in a blanket and he commented on how well-preserved my aunt's face was for someone who had likely been dead since Monday. My mom's cousin kept going on about how beautiful my aunt had been, how beautiful and how incredibly jealous she had always been of her sisters, which according to her is the reason my aunt wanted to kill herself. That she saw all her siblings succeed in life and, being the youngest, lagged behind, and thus judged herself unfairly, and thus wanted to die et cetera. After the body was picked up we left but we have to go back a bunch more to help clean the house and stuff because after the month is up the house has to be returned since it's only a rental apartment. I didn't cry until I was at home and then it was about something else at first and I don't know how I feel and I don't know why but I got so frustrated and I don't know what to do. I keep feeling okay and then there's this sting of remembrance of something I can never do anymore, some previously-regular hangout with my aunt or something we liked to do together (dinner, movies, park, reading, watching rupaul, etc) and I see her face, mouth open and fingers blackened and skin purple-discoloured and the man from the funeral home saying she was oddly well-preserved and my mom's cousin saying she had always been beautiful and that was why she never worked a day in her life, never put any effort in, and that was why she had never been happy and had never succeeded. And I wonder if my aunt was pretty because I never thought of her like that, I only ever thought of her as my aunt, my weird and funny and frustrating aunt who is dead now. And I feel like I shouldn't have been born. And my mom keeps asking if I want a calming pill, one she took from my aunt's house because she wasn't going to use them anymore anyways, and meanwhile I'm afraid to take any pill, even one perscribed to me, and I'm afraid to get close to the floor, to even touch it, even at home in this completely different house from the one she was found in, and I'm afraid to lay down.

In-between the police call and the police actually arriving my mom's husband swung by (after first ringing the wrong doorbell, he had no clue where my aunt lived) and started trying to take over the operation saying he would be the one to talk to police et cetera. My mom's cousin repeatedly said she didn't want him there but he didn't listen, only eventually leaving when my mom asked him to. He was mad all evening and when my mom said that her cousin had asked him to leave he said something along the lines of "well, be glad I didn't hear her say that, because you don't know what I would've done to her. Doesn't she realize I wasn't there for her? I was there for you two." (meaning, my mom and me. We did not want him there either.)

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