Carcasses

An informal, Frazier and Dillard inspired essay:

Terry and her mother have an almost disturbingly fearless approach to carcasses. Terry, when she finds the dead swan on the beach, instinctively walks over to it and holds it in her arms. Her mother recalls a moment when she was younger, needing to see her dog's "broken body" and embrace it a last time. But the need to hold a corpse or carcass is not unique to these women, as it is a common response to death I have seen in dramatic movie scenes and read in other books for animals and people alike. When my own dog died, my neighbors (who most likely cursed at her during her lifetime for barking at night and crapping in their flowerbeds) helped us bury her under a dogwood tree. My parents put her in her bed cover, and my devoutly Christian neighbors blessed her and told me about the life she was going to live in heaven. Then the woman of the couple, I forget her name, held up my dog's limp head through the bed cover and pet her and that is what I remember most because I found it especially disturbing. It separated me from any emotion to her as a dog and made me want to bury her as fast as possible.

I am the same way with road kill - looking at them makes my stomach turn not because of anger of the way their end came about, but because for some irrational reason it is deeply unsettling to see lifeless flesh. We did once house a comatose raccoon my stepdad found on the side of the road. We fed him(? hard to tell) in his sleep hoping he'd wake up, which was even more disturbing because I was not really convinced he was alive. At some point he woke up briefly. After about a week I visited him and he wasn't breathing. I touched him (A MISTAKE) and I did not feel a heartbeat and that was not a feeling I like to remember. Which is ridiculous when you think about it. I am not religious, so I think death is pretty straight forward - for some reason or other the animal's body stops working and then it decomposes. But for some reason the second they become a carcass, it becomes repulsive. I am guessing spirituality is what makes Terry, Diane, and my neighbor think of dead animals differently from me. A belief that they continue to live in another way, though I don't if it is commonly thought of for animals besides humans, is where I think religion may have begun. When I was little whenever my cat killed a rodent, my friend, my sister and I would hold a burial for it, which was my first exposure to a religious look at death. My friend taught my sister and I a prayer which he led us in, and after one of these funerals, my little sister pronounced, "I believe in God."

But what is strangest to me is that bones don't really disturb people much. Over the course of the intensive, I have picked up a few bones including parts of a deer's skeleton - skull, jaw and teeth, metatarsal bone, and piece of spine. Also found the top of a smaller animal's skull, and a cow femur and more deer teeth. I picked them all up without thinking or any repulsion. People take bones as souvenirs from their short excursions in the wilderness. Placing a found deer skull on a fence post is a boast of unearned victory. Perhaps this comes from a hunting instinct and a need to give yourself a feeling of accomplishment. Or maybe it is also spiritual, and comes from the thought that bones still hold part of the animal. More likely I think it is like other things people collect. I pick up anything I find interesting enough, and bones have a mystery about them that is certainly cause for interest.

From here I can discern that the flesh is what I find disturbing. I guess it is because it is devoured and decomposed by other organisms before I can accept the loss of the animal. It is a reminder that you yourself are temporary and destabilizes what you know to be real. Bones, relative to our short lifetime, are a final end and at least to me symbolizes the complete fading of the animal they used to carry. I just suddenly remembered, that when my sister learned of my dog's death, she cried, "But then she will just be bones!", and she repeated this for much of that morning. She used to get extremely upset by any mention of death. I find it surprising in hindsight, that it was the idea of an animal disappearing that upset her, and not what she would miss. And in fact she was greatly comforted when our honorary grandpa told her about the life she was having as a spirit. Shortly after she claimed she saw my dog's ghost, which I find funny.

However my view is one sided. I realize not everyone finds a carcass to be unsettling. I'm not an animal activist, I just don't eat meat because I used be disgusted by it and it's been so long I don't crave it. But a lot of people still hunt and most people eat other animals. And for people who have access to a range of other foods, consumption of animals is no longer necessary for good health and survival. This is among other attachments people still have to wilderness. But there are problems that arise when people keep their place in the natural food chain while simultaneously trying to separate themselves from nature. Meat raising farms are an unfair disruption to this network of prey and predators and decomposition.

On a last note, bones are not the last stage, only the last we might live long enough to see. I take it back that I am not upset by bones. The deer skull I was a bit reluctant to touch after discovering this pattern of decay running down the forehead:

After I let the skull sit for awhile, slugs and beetles gradually began to crawl out from the eye sockets, they had all been aiding the process of its decomposition. The trees podcast as well made me think of the soil reclaiming the remains, or the fungus that carries it to the trees that bears fruit that feeds the deer. I find now nature to be less serene and peaceful than it is made out to be. Really it is constantly devouring itself and feeding and growing and regardless if someone places me in a coffin or not, I may be devoured and fed on as well so who knows. The trees may have been out there to get me since my birth.