RDP Thursday – Farm

“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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiIBpHC7Lfo