Sometimes we plan our trips and vacations and our moves from one home to another- and sometimes they are planned and executed by someone else for us- or more specifically to us.
Sometimes we have to take a little time out to reflect on our lives and what it all meant and sometimes other people do it for us:
Photo A.M. Moscoso
But when it comes right down to it, Life is Cruel and so is Death and life is funny and dramatic and so is Death- in my opinion though Death seems to enjoy it’s job so much more.
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”
― T.S. Eliot
When you write tales of the macabre, when your interests involve forensics, when you are fascinated by the terrible things people do to each other because it’s not the act but the justification that actually captures your imagination then in your research and travels and the strange places to learn about these things, you end up meeting some unique people and you are bound to learn about places like The Body Farm.
The Body farm is a place where corpses are planted and set out in various stages of being and they are left there to let nature takes it’s course and while nature and the corpse are working together to return the body to the Earth people who study forensic science study them.
It doesn’t smell great, bugs are involved and what was once inside of us finds a way to briefly, to have their moment in the Sun.
Odd imagery aside- Body Farms are important places of learning and study; they’re not amusement parks.
Body Farms, like morgues and embalming rooms are sad places and they are lonely places but in the end, one corpse is willing to go through this experience to help the living understand what has happened to another corpse under much more tragic circumstances.
Noble as that is, it doesn’t make their situation any less sad or any less lonely and unlike their brothers and sisters, sleeping in cemeteries under neatly trimmed lawns and their resting places marked by tombstones and flowers- for a brief time the corpses at the Body Farms have some unglamorous work to do.
After their work is done, they are taken away to meet their new neighbors in their quiet gated community with the flowers and the green grass and shady trees where they are free to join them in their interrupted slumber.
But in the end, I think we can agree, it is a very well deserved rest.
Na/GloPoWriMo Prompt# 18 : Write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail. This may not be a “fun” prompt, but loss is one of the most universal and human experiences, and some of the world’s most moving art is an effort to understand and deal with it.
Vilhelm Hammershøi,
On a table next to her bed
three unread books
their spines turned towards the wall
on top of the books is box of Kleenex stamped with birds and flowers
holding them down, keeping them from running away, forgotten but not forgotten.
In the kitchen behind a bag of flour
is a red box full of heart shaped chocolates
tied shut with a wilted silver ribbon
untasted , forgotten but not forgotten
Down in the basement piled inside of plastic crate with a light green lid
interred
behind bags of fertilizer, rusted file cabinets and children’s bicycles
are
photograph albums full of smiling people, sunshine, dogs and cats and Christmas trees
