Frida Kahlo’s true feelings on bearing children may never be entirely clear. Some biographers are so keen to protect her saintly image that they have rebranded her medical abortions as the devastating “miscarriages” of an otherwise eager mother. Other biographers insist that Kahlo was uninterested in children and that her “poor health” was just an excuse to duck the cultural expectation of raising a family.
Upstairs, in Kahlo’s small bedroom, there was a pre-Columbian urn containing her ashes. On her single bed lay Frida’s death mask, an eerie reminder that the artist had bled and died in this very room. Above her bed Frida had hung a painting: a dead infant, swaddled in white, wearing a flower crown, lying on a satin pillow: an Angelito.
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* His name has been changed.
NORTH CAROLINA
CULLOWHEE
The grey whale is an impressive creature—fifty feet long and weighing over thirty-six tons, with formidable flukes spanning ten feet. A dozen miles off the coast of California, she emerges into view and exhales with a final, weakened puff. After sixty-five years, death has come for the great beast, and she hangs limp at the surface.
Some whales begin to sink straightaway, but this particular whale will remain afloat. Inside the carcass, tissues and proteins are breaking down, organs are liquefying, and gases are building up—they are filling the whale’s blubbery outer casing, transforming her into a macabre balloon. If she were to be punctured in a single spot, the force of the pressurized gases would launch her mushy innards several yards from her body. But this whale’s skin holds. Gases slip out slowly; our former cetacean deflates and begins her gradual descent to the sea floor below. Down, down she goes, traveling more than a mile, until at last the beast meets soft bottom.
Down here in the bathyal (or midnight) zone of the ocean, it is cold and completely dark—sunlight does not reach these depths. Our whale hasn’t come down here to “rest in peace” and lie on the ocean floor in cool, undisturbed darkness. Her remains are about to become the location of a grand banquet that will last decades. This process, known in the ocean science community as a whale fall, creates an entire ecosystem around the carcass—like a pop-up restaurant for the alienlike creatures of the primordial depths.
The mobile scavengers smell the whale and arrive first to feast. They are the quintessential otherworldly denizens of the deep: sleeper sharks, hagfish (an unfair name—they’re more like slime-producing eels than fish), crabs, and ratfish. They begin tearing into the decomposed flesh, consuming up to 130 pounds a day.
Once the bulk of the organic material has been picked clean, the area around the carcass becomes a hotspot of life on an otherwise barren seabed. Mollusks and crustaceans set up camp. A thick red fuzz of deep-sea worms grows on the whale’s bones, 45,000 of them per square meter. The worms’ Latin name, Osedax, means “bone devourer.” True to that designation, these eyeless, mouthless creatures will burrow into the bones and extract oils and fats from within them. Recently, scientists have discovered that the sulfur-loving bacteria present at a whale fall are similar to those found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
The site of the whale fall turns into a decades-long version of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, a debauched, celebratory party where creatures devour the whale “course by course, one by one.” The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.
To be fair, science has yet to determine how whales feel about this state of affairs. Given the chance, would they prefer to forgo the whale fall and have their carcasses locked up in an impenetrable coral reef fortress somewhere? A postmortem safe haven, perhaps, but one that would prevent other animals from benefiting from the vital nutrients that are no longer of use to the departed whale?
Whales spend their whole lives supporting the environment that surrounds them. Their diet is fish and krill, and for years humans assumed that fewer whales = more fish and krill for us. This equation justified the whaling industry’s slaughter of almost three million whales in the twentieth century alone.
As it turns out, fewer whales does not mean more fish. Whales dive down to the shadowy depths of the ocean to feed. They must return to the surface to breathe, and while there, they release robust fecal plumes. (Note: Poop, they’re pooping.) The whale poop is full of iron and nitrogen, which trickle down to fertilize plankton, which—you guessed it—fish and krill depend upon to live and thrive. Whales are a crucial part of this cycle during their lives, and in death they are no different.
Instinctually, you may feel the same pull to contribute past your own death. How else to explain the increasing popularity of the refrain: “When I die, no fuss. Just dig a hole and put me in it.”
A sensible request, indeed. Sending your corpse back into nature would seem to be both the most inexpensive and the most “green” option for your death. After all, the plants and animals we consume during our lives are grown and nourished by the soil.
A single acre of soil can contain 2,400 pounds of fungi, 1,500 pounds of bacteria, 900 pounds of earthworms, 890 pounds of arthropods and algae, and 133 pounds of protozoa. The soil teems with life, as does the dead body (inside its sausage casing of keratin, or dead skin). Microscopic sorcery takes place when a body is placed just a few feet deep in the soil. Here, the trillions of bacteria living inside you will liquefy your innards. When the built-up pressure breaks the seal of skin an orgiastic reunion takes place, in which our bodies merge with the earth.
We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.
“HOW WOULD YOU describe what we’re doing here, Katrina?”
She thought for a moment before replying, “We’re setting up the experiments.”
“What are the experiments?”
“Wait, let’s not call them ‘experiments,’ that makes it sound like I’m a mad scientist.”
“What’s a better word than experiments?”
“We’re here setting up the mounds. No, that’s equally creepy. Dammit.”
I waited.
“Let’s just say we’re tweaking the mound recipe,” she decided, only half satisfied.
You have to be careful with language if you’re Katrina Spade, the person leading the charge, as the New York Times put it, to “turn corpses into compost.” It is a delicate sales pitch, a proposal that toes the line between eco-death innovation and the deranged Soylent Green scheme of a charlatan.