death, dying, and decay.

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin

I don't have to do nothin' but stay black and die!
Mogan Freeman as Joe Clark in Lean on Me

Seen on the highway: a phone book, swollen with dried rainwater.

Seen on the highway: several dozen used brown loafers, strewn in the space between the highway and an off-ramp.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a deer on the side of the highway, right next to the fast lane. It was lying on its side, its head facing back towards oncoming traffic, its feet inches away from the divider in the center of the highway. It had been hit by a car, I guess. I immediately thought of how terrifying its last few moments must have been. Fleeing the suburbs, it had darted into the highway, realizing too late the danger, face-to-face with three lanes of oncoming traffic. Panicked, it probably kept running, hoping to get to safety, finding only a 6 foot concrete wall. It never had a chance.

Two days later I drove by again, and it was still there. The next week, it was still there. In the first days after it happened, the deer began swelling up, but by the time I drove by the next week, hoping it would be gone, it had become only a shell of what it had once been.

Yesterday, it was gone. Someone must have picked it up. I wonder, was it animal control? Waste management? Who takes care of dead things?

My ex-boyfriend grew up on a sheep farm. They had to dump their own trash, and he told me of the massive bins where the farmers dumped their refuse: separate bins for household rubbish, broken appliances, yard waste. He told me all the bins were marked by diamond-shaped yellow signs, like you might see on the highway. There was one with an upside-down cow on it. For dead livestock. At the time I was mortified, and fascinated.

I guess I still feel that way about death. Like, it's just evidence of the passing of time, a perfectly logical and normal "next step" (and last step, I suppose): the end of a road everyone walks down. At the same time, it is something that should be marked, and not ignored, or left to rot on the side of the road. Those videos taken by people who "liberated" concentration camps in WW2, where there were so many bodies they had to be bulldozed, people's arms and legs sticking out at unnatural angles, rolling over each other, piling up so high. It's probably the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. Obviously, genocide is terrible. But also, the bodies have lost their identities. The mass of bodies, rotting into one another; it just seems so disrespectful.

I don't know why all those bodies weren't cremated like the bodies of so many people who died in concentration camps. Wikipedia states that many Jews even today have a negative opinion of cremation (it's also against Orthodox Jewish beliefs in the ways dead bodies should be handled). The remains of the 12 German war criminals convicted in the Nuremburg trials were cremated and spread in secret locations, to prevent the building of a memorial to them.

I always wanted to be cremated. I felt repulsed imagining bugs crawling through my head. Then I found out that when you are cremated, sometimes they have to turn over what's left of your body to make sure it gets totally incinerated. I know I'll be dead then, and it won't really matter, but I can't help but imagine myself, in a giant oven, being turned over, my limbs half gone, moving in unnatural ways, and I don't like it. Then I think about embalmers emptying the blood out of my body and filling me with chemicals, and I don't know what I want.

I'm not one who wants to pretend death doesn't exist, or that I can somehow avoid it. There is a middle ground between letting someone rot on the side of the road and dressing a body up, preserving it for the future. In a way I feel like that's just a way to pretend the person hasn't actually died, that nothing has changed. Really, the only thing in that person's future as far as we know is getting buried.

Death is not something terrible and awful (although the situations surrounding it can be), it just is what it is. It still should be marked, I think, like a rite of passage, a graduation of sorts. I just don't know why we have to handle it in such bizarre ways.

(I wonder what they did with the deer?)