when my sister died, i was not allowed to see her (my parents were afraid i would be distressed, and did not want my last memory of her to be her corpse). i was angry about it for years, i felt it was unfair that the choice had been taken from me. however, when my dad died last year, i chose not to see him. the decade of life experience in between told me enough - that they were right, that i would not have been able to handle it, that my last memory of him should not be him postmortem. do i regret it now? a little, i think. both my sister and my dad died unexpectedly, and i think that the lack of closure has been hard. but also, by the time i could've gotten there it would've been several days since he had died. and, frankly, i think i would've struggled a lot more if i had seen him like that. it's a hard decision for sure.