Rotting Skunks, Burial At Sea, Romantic Decay, And The Conviviality Of The Dead
Our friend Travis found me a dead skunk, in January, where he was camping near the Santa Barbara coast. He kindly saved him in an ice chest until I could retrieve him, but it was a few days, and a warm winter, and by the time I took possession of the skunk he was in pretty rough shape. The skunk had been flattened by a truck, overrun with vermin, frozen and defrosted and frozen again, and when I got down to the business of skinning him, he was the deadest dead thing I had ever seen. I couldn’t even identify the parts of his body. His jaw had been shattered, his teeth jutting through his face in a hideous O like a lamprey’s mouth. His back legs were gone. Inside, his organs were completely liquefied: where I expected to find his bowels or stomach or liver was just a swollen bag of goo.
I had done a bunch of reading on how to skin a skunk without activating its scent glands but it was clearly unnecessary: the skunk had already discharged his scent before he died, and that smell mixed with the smell of putrefaction to make one of the worst odors I’d ever encountered. I had to skin him outside, wearing two layers of heavy-duty disposable gloves, then bleaching all my tools and stripping off my clothes on the back porch before I came inside the house.
Still, I tried. I cleaned and salted and disinfected and soaked the skin over and over in different chemicals, trying to arrest the process of decay. At some point it became clear this skunk wasn’t going to make it, but I hated to give up. Because Travis had been so kind to get him for me, and because I had never worked on a skunk before, but mostly because, while the skunk’s front was a mess, his back was perfect. The long white stripe was intact from the back of his head all the way down to the tip of his bushy hair, as fluffy and clean as a beloved pet’s. He was simultaneously very disgusting and very beautiful.
***
It’s been a dramatic summer for bodies. Five of my friends have recently given birth, two others are starting transitions, and less joyfully, my mother was in the hospital for more than a month with a serious infection. And of course I’m pregnant, too, eight months today, full as the moon, swollen as a tick, and like a dead skunk, simultaneously beautiful and disgusting. But the summer is always the time I’m most aware of my body, something to be coddled with cool rags and all-cotton underwear and ice cubes applied gingerly to the inside of my wrists. In summer every surface in my house is a Victorian fainting couch on which I recline in theatrical misery. Every afternoon I mince painfully into the house, sun-stunned and with my lower back aching*, strip off all my clothes in the hallway on the way to the bathroom, take a shower, and then lie damp and naked on top of our cool white duvet under the ceiling fan, doing my daily kick count while scrolling through Instagram like clicking through a rosary: one prayer for someone’s dog, one prayer for someone’s dinner.
This summer I’ve been reading Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. I read it mostly at the Verdugo Aquatic Center, where I watch my children bob and glisten in the water and then sun themselves like lizards on the pool’s edge. I read while peering over the top of the book to make sure they are safe, pausing from time to time to shout “no running!” or to congratulate Beatrice on her new underwater backflip or to dispense their weekly allowance money dollar by dollar to spend on sour Skittles from the Snack Shack. Occasionally I put down the book to do a few awkward laps in the shallow end, then retreat to my protective layers of linen cover-ups and straw hats and the constant reapplication of SPF 80 (among other things, this summer I was diagnosed with autoimmune photosensitivity - i.e., I’m allergic to the sun). We go to the pool so often we’ve become a bit of a fixture there, the two children skinny and blue-lipped even in August, and me, a very pregnant woman in a sky-blue bikini, heaving a grateful sigh on the last rung of the pool ladder before lying back to float away my heaviness.
The Work of the Dead (reviewed here) is about the position of dead bodies in (mostly Anglo-American) culture, about the ways that proximity to the dead in the form of intercessionary prayers and churchyard burials and war memorials holds the departed as a continuing part of the human community, whose “work” is to reinforce our changing cultural values. Even now, Laqueur argues, in an age of widespread cremation and anonymous mega-cemeteries like Forest Lawn, the dead still labor in service to the living.
***
Two years ago and a few days before Christmas, 10 o’clock and Zac and I were the only ones still awake in his father’s farm house in northwest Virginia. Outside it was cold but not snowy, the ground all frozen muck, the air dark and heavy with that sort of anticipatory late December stillness that reminds me of childhood. I was stretched out on the family room sectional, my feet in Zac’s lap, watching him scroll around and around through his father’s Netflix suggestions, a list of cozy British detective shows whose titles rose to ever-increasing levels of self-parody (one show was about two middle-aged lady gardeners named Rosemary and Thyme who solve murders by means of gardening).
For some reason Zac made a joke about someday burying me at sea. We talk about the sea all the time - we both love Moby Dick and rigging diagrams and shanties - in fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve both made that exact same joke before. So he was understandably surprised when I immediately burst into tears. And not delicate, mournful tears, but ragged and frenzied panic-attack tears, as though I were fighting off someone who was at that very moment trying to bury me (alive) at sea.
I talk and write about death all the time, of course, and joke and fret and dream about it, too, but in this moment the everyday fear of death, diffuse and largely speculative, was replaced by a raw, immediate terror. It was the difference between knowing you’ll die “someday” and someone pitching you off a boat right now. But what terrified me wasn’t the fact that I will die (though I’m not thrilled about that) but the idea that I’d die alone. I pictured my lonely little body, drifting in empty silence to the bottom of the vast open ocean, to disintegrate all by itself, without even another dead person to talk to.
“Promise me you won’t bury me all alone,” I sobbed to Zac. “Promise me you’ll bury me with other dead people, so I have friends."
I do not want to disintegrate all alone in the cold spacious sea, but in a warm cemetery jostled by other gently moldering bodies, the end of a dinner party when everyone is standing around a little too drunk and confiding in the crowded apartment kitchen of Eternity. (I'm dead but I still want to be invited to things.)
Zac and I got engaged on Sunday and the only condition I placed on our future marriage was that I wanted him to be buried with me. He had previously planned to be cremated but he was willing to reconsider, and so he promised we’d be buried side by side, as close together as local ordinances allow. (I want a natural burial, without a coffin, so there won’t be anything between us except the intervening years between the first death and the next.)
I know death is ugly. Not only the fact of dying, the unfairness of who suffers and why, but the physical fact of decomposition is ugly. But compared to the rending cataclysm of birth, all blood and gulps of air and snotty crying, decomposition is gentle. I’ve had people I love live awhile in my body before going painfully away; someday I will fold myself into the body of someone I love and stay. I lie in bed with Zac holding hands as we drift apart into our separate dreams, and imagine mushrooms blooming between our bodies, tendrils of moss twisting his wild hair and the constellation of freckles across his back slowing returning again to the constituent elements of soil and stars. Like the children emerging from the pool with red eyes and runny noses, like my moon-white belly crossed with blue veins, like the skunk slowly disintegrating in a bucket of salt water and the baby drifting in her slimy interior sea, it is both very disgusting and perfectly lovely.
* From BabyCenter, on lower back pain in pregnancy: “Your expanding uterus shifts your center of gravity and stretches and weakens your abdominal muscles, changing your posture and putting a strain on your back. Hormonal changes in pregnancy loosen your joints and the ligaments that attach your pelvic bones to your spine. This can make you feel less stable and cause pain when you walk, stand, sit for long periods, roll over in bed, get out of a low chair or the tub, bend, or lift things.” That is, when you do - or do not do - any physical action at all.
It’s the one-year anniversary of this Tiny Letter! If you’re new, you can read previous letters here.
You Can Find Me
This Sunday, August 5, I’ll be reading at The Mandrake Bar 5-7pm with Rico Gagliano, Mary Anna King, and Lynell George, hosted by the indispensable Julia Ingalls. Check out all the info here.
Then, get ready for Hot Dish! August 11, 5-8pm at 826LA Echo Park, with readings by Shauna Barbosa, Hope Ewing, Peter Hsu, Siel Ju, MariNaomi, and Ashley Perez, hosted by me and J. Ryan Stradal. You can get all the details here.
I’m taking a maternity leave break from teaching weekly classes, but I’m planning on teaching a few one- and two-day seminars this winter, stay tuned.
Zac has been orchestrating a Dungeons & Dragons quest for the kids, and while I’ve never played D&D, I was reminded of this old essay on my short and ignominious foray into role-playing games.
Unless I’m Busy
Reveling in the joy of Midsummer Night’s Scream and ScareLA, attending Episcopal Night at Dodger Stadium (really), back to school shopping, drinking red raspberry leaf tea, finding Beatrice a “junior bridesmaid” dress, scheming to bring an amazing Halloween event to Burbank (and doing my part to Save Magnolia Boulevard)
What I’m Reading
I’m finishing up The Work of the Dead and this month’s book club pick, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis. For book research I’ve been reading about the history of San Fernando Valley land development, but nothing tops this 1947 Walt Disney promotional flyer for the city of Burbank.
When my mom was in the hospital, I sent her Follow Her Home, the first book in Steph Cha’s Juniper Song series and the perfect gift for someone who both grew up in L.A. and loves mysteries.
R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries just arrived on my doorstep and I’m pretty excited.
Also I'm Very Excited About
This recipe for a pull-apart vanilla coconut cake with whipped cream frosting and mixed berries (I brought it along to two 4th of July parties but it would work any day of the summer), Dr. Jart+ Cicapair Color Correcting Camo Drops for perennially pink-faced people like myself (thank you to Nicole Cliffe’s skincare newsletter for this tip!), Bb.’s Don’t Blow It Fine (H)air Styler, the Honestly Astrology Twitter account (especially their recent long threads like this one about Scorpios and Geminis). A few months ago Aubrey sent me Every Radiohead Album Described With Peep Show and it continues to delight me.