The Stench of Death

I have slaughtered my own deer, cows, pigs, chickens and goats for meat.  I have watched men bleed to death and seen women give birth.  With my bare fingers I have cleansed wounds crawling with maggots.  I have operated on cows and horses.  I have sewn dogs up and even a skunk or two.  But the stench of death is something that overpowers me.  It doesn't come into sharp focus until the third day dawns. Within five days you can pick it up with a shovel but it crumbles apart as you bend down to look.

Most people think the stench of death would evaporate and go away in the winds of time passing.  Your only likely brush with death has been in a hospital where leaking body fluids are immediately contained and quickly flushed away.  The floors are scrubbed with disinfectant.  The plastic coated mattresses are washed.   Air conditioning runs night and day to drag out the first stench of death and disease. 

Little wonder you would feel that way in our isolated world today.  We (today) don't even smell rotten tomatoes very often.  You probably don't even remember the rank smell of an outdoor toilet as it began creeping too full.  You have probably never chanced upon the mortal remains of a dead cow sacrificed so that a tender rump roast might grace your plate.  Little wonder then you cannot imagine a smell that smolders on still and magnifies in the eddies of air.  Nonetheless, it is so -- and it is only natural that it is so.

Death does not just blow away.  In the forest the dead are quickly consumed by other critters.  What little is left seeps through the leaves and cloys the ground.  In the desert the sun slams the remains with an all-searching bleach and the dry howling winds suck out every drop of moisture.  But before the time of dissipation can drum its way through the flesh (left untended) ripens into corruption and the stench of a human gone dead smolders and magnifies in the eddies of air.  One sniff, a gasp, and then comes the retching unless one can remove immediately from the concentrated stench of death. 

"Oh, surely not," you protest.  "Surely not."

It did take almost six months for my mother to wither away and then pass on.  It was not a kindly death, not for her or for us.  Only love and duty made her passing bearable.  Body fluids leaked from every part of her body.  Perhaps even worse for me, the tobacco juice that dribbled from her mouth seldom reached the spit can but pooled up on the bedding and dripped from thence into the carpet.   The floors in Mama's room cannot be scrubbed.  Today the smell of death there saturates every fiber of a deep plush carpet.  It leaks out into the kitchen and climbs onto the counters where food is left out too long.  Six months later the smell of death is just now coming to the fully ripened stage in her room. 

My wife can smell no evil.  Even the direct assault of an angry skunk leaves her wondering why others blanch and turn away.  She is also untouched by this smell of death.  I do not want to breathe or eat those parts remaining from my mother still here in my home.  Therefore it is I who must determine when the food left open on the counter has absorbed too many little corpses and hurl it from the house or flush it down the toilet.  My wife watches me with wondering eyes and then shakes her head.  "I'm sorry."

Women are always sorry.  That doesn't mean they accept blame,
just that they are sorry someone thinks blame must be fixed. 
"Tell Jackie you are sorry."  "Jackie, I'm sorry your little nose broke when my big fist hit it." 

Sorry is good.  But it isn't good enough.  "Keep that door shut!  Open the windows.  Put a blower in the windows so that it sucks the air and the smells OUT of the house."

She reminds me we have done that off and on for weeks already.  Even guaranteed odor killers work only for an hour or two, and then the stench of death comes back as strong as ever.  "Then we will do it for more weeks.  And then more weeks again because everything in that room is contaminated, saturated with the stench of death.  The curtains are off the windows so that sunlight can stream in, if we ever have any sunlight."