Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

After collecting myself, I stopped to ask directions from a park ranger, who led me to the turnoff for the Cathedral Trees Trail. There was no one on the trail with me as I descended into the canopy of towering, sacred trees, some more than a thousand years old. I could sense their ancient wisdom as I made my way down the hill. It was when I reached the bottom that I realized I had gone there to die. I hadn’t consciously planned to do so, but I had written my last e-mails, stated what I wanted done with my body, and carried with me in my backpack the agent of my demise. Twenty minutes earlier I sped straight toward the cliff’s edge because I was furious at myself for being so pathetically lost, ruining the sanctity of my final day.

I felt fucking cheated. Culture exists to provide answers to the big human questions: love and death. When I was still a young girl, my culture made me two promises. The first promise was that society knows what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is that death be kept hidden. That promise was shattered at Westwind, which I had discovered was playing its part in a vast mortality cover-up. Now that I had seen our society’s structural denial of death, it was hard for me to stop thinking about. I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality. I felt like Muchukunda, the mythical Hindu king who, when asked by a god what reward he desired for his years of fighting (literal) demons, wished for nothing more than never-ending sleep. Death, for me, was like a never-ending sleep. And I longed for it.

The second promise was delivered by popular culture, which laid out the narrative that a girl is owed the prize of true love. I didn’t believe myself to be a slave to popular-culture narratives (spoiler: I was). Instead I believed what I shared with Luke was a rational, passionate connection with another human being. But somehow I was wrong about everything. Both of the promises my culture made to me were broken, my webs of significance snapped. None of my privileged assumptions about the world could be counted on anymore.

For what seemed like hours, no one came by. This was a well-trod hiking trail, but today there was absolutely not a soul. So there I sat, debating whether or not to walk into the forest. If I did, I would follow the example of painter Paul Gauguin, who tried to commit suicide by swallowing arsenic deep in the mountains of Tahiti. He had just finished one of his greatest paintings, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin hoped that no humans would find his body so that ants would eat his corpse. In his zeal, he swallowed too much arsenic. His body rejected the poison, and he vomited it back up. He woke up, wandered out of the mountains, and lived for six more years.

Like Gauguin, I wanted the animals to devour my body. There is, after all, a thin line between a corpse and a carcass. I was just as much an animal as the other creatures in the redwood forest. A deer needs no embalming, sealed caskets, or headstones. He is free to lie where he dies. My whole life I had eaten other animals, and now I would offer myself to them. Nature would at last have its chance with me.

Botflies can smell a carcass from ten miles away. Chances are they would arrive first to the feast. They would lay their eggs on the outside of my corpse, eggs that would need only a single day to hatch into maggots. The new maggots would tunnel into my body, impervious to the onset of my putrefaction. A marvel of engineering, their mouths allow them to breathe and eat at the same time.

If you are interested in the other, more honorable, guests at the feast, may I submit the bald eagle, symbol of America? They are natural scavengers and do not pass up the opportunity to take advantage of dead meat. Their sharp beaks would rip away strips of my flesh and carry them into the sky.

My body in the woods might also attract a black bear. Omnivorous, they can hunt fish and even young moose, but they have no compunction about scavenging dead bodies. One of which I would become.

After the animals had consumed my flesh, the dermestid beetle would be the final creature to arrive. These plain, inconspicuous beetles eat wool, feathers, fur, and, in my case, dried skin and hair. They would eat everything except my bones, leaving my bare, white skeleton lying anonymously on the forest floor.

In this way my body’s decomposition would also be a banquet. My corpse would not be a disgusting mass of corruption but a source of life, dispensing molecules and creating new creatures. It would be the finest acknowledgment that I was but one tiny cog in the ecosystem’s wheel, a blip in the majestic workings of the natural world.

We all know how this story turned out. In spite of my fear of living, I chose not to die.

I had become a lonely creature in my time at Westwind, but like Chris held on to thirty-five-year-old coconuts, I held on to friends. These friends didn’t live in San Francisco or L.A., but they were out there, along with my parents, who loved me desperately. I didn’t take much stock in the value of my life in that moment, but I knew I didn’t want them to feel the hopeless ambiguity I had felt years before, left to guess what had become of the little girl at the shopping mall.

I walked out of the forest, and turned the corner into a magnificent field of wildflowers. The colors were brighter than I thought colors could be.