Maggots
Image Credit: Muffin Creatives via Pexels
Written by Emilia Zarychta
The first time I ever thought about death was when I was 6. It was at my grandma’s funeral, who so conveniently decided to die on my birthday. The not-so-special celebration was wrapped up quickly and spent in sadness and mourning. The balloons and flowers wilted, and the ice cream cake was left on the dining table long enough for it to melt. Instead of blowing out the candles like a normal six-year-old, I was dragged away by my father and put into his 1996 Prius to go see my mother in the hospital. She had a gut feeling about my grandmother’s death, like she did about many other things in our lives and went to take care of her a day before my turning a year older. The candles were mixed in with the now liquefied vanilla and raspberry ice cream, seeping through the mahogany wood.
The next few days were silent. Murmurs of casket colours and flower arrangements bounced off the empty living room walls. No one dared to utter my grandmother’s name while every question was confirmed with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from my almost comatose mother. She took it the hardest.
The funeral was short and quick. My father cried, earnestly but silently, for his mother lying in the ground. Mine sat on the wet graveyard grass with her legs stretched out before her, staring at the lowering black coffin. I was too young to understand anything the preacher was saying. The only thing that stuck with my toddler brain was “her soul and spirit shall live on forever while her body remains between moist fabric, wood and mother nature’s precious earth.” I didn’t know why he said that. I was confused by what he meant. Why was her body left behind? Why did it have to rot and skeletonise in a box six feet underground while her spirit roamed free? Didn’t her physical self matter enough for it to not be abandoned in this cruel world? Suffocated by layers of earth?
That day was also when I questioned God for the first time. If he loved and cared for all his children, then why did people die? Why were people created to work, cry, laugh, love and just… live, for it to all be over in a few miserable seconds?
My father called me selfish when I asked him this a few years later at my 13th birthday party. He said that I should be grateful for being alive and healthy instead of questioning the Lord and his actions. From that day on, I stopped believing in this unforgiving God and the ice cream cake was once again left to melt.
During that night I had a nightmare, where my body lay fresh in the ground next to my grandmother’s rotting corpse. There were hundreds of maggots in her hair and mouth burrowing themselves deeper and deeper and deeper into her skull, her brain. A brain that once loved me.
I tried desperately to get them off her, but I couldn’t move. I was dead too.
I woke up screaming with my parents running in to ask what’s wrong. I couldn’t explain it. There were no words in the world that could help me explain what that nightmare made me feel. Even if there were, they wouldn’t understand. I didn’t either.
In that moment I realised that I’ll never have an answer satisfying enough. No matter how many times I’ll get close to reaching it, it will always slip away from my grasp.
I live my life without regretting too much, or loving too little when there should be love all around, always finding some time to think about my grandmother, the maggots, and the universal conundrum of death.
And when I die, I hope my brain dies with me, so I won’t be stuck in the deepness and darkness of the earth, picking away at my loved ones around me to try and save them from the maggots trying to erase proof of their short existence.