Repeat after me: pallor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, decomposition, skeletonization—this is what awaits us.
When I’m at Holy Cross, I like to sit on my bench and think about disintegration. I like to think about all the people disintegrating beneath me and around me, all the coffins full of bones and clothing and watches that have stopped ticking.
I’m not a technical person, I may have told you that already, but I make an effort when I want to understand.
As far as I can tell, there are five stages to the biological process of decomposition: bloat, fresh decay, active decay, advanced decay, and dry/remains.
On the Internet there’s a sequence of photographs of a pig undergoing these five stages in a pastoral setting. In the first image the pig is pink as marzipan, but soon it becomes gray mush, and by the last image it’s a small heap of black ash. Although there is something undeniably poetic about the terminology of death, the snapshots elicit the observation that when it comes to the empirical process, virtually every last trace of poetry will flee the scene.
It seems that how quickly you disintegrate depends on the kind of soil you’re buried in, whether it’s of neutral acidity or acid peaty soil—I believe the body deteriorates more gradually in the latter, though I have no idea about the quality of soil in Culver City. Being in a coffin slows things down, but generally you’re a skeleton within a year. That is to say, you are a framework, a supporting structure, a dried-up thing.
Everyone goes through the five stages—unless you divert or speed up the process, unless you’re Saint Bernadette, who, when they exhumed her corpse forty years after her death from tuberculosis in the bone of her right knee, had decided not to decompose. Yet each corpse that is open to corruption decays at its own pace, its own speed, disintegrates at its own rate, according to its own internal rhythm: at Holy Cross, there are 163,471 humans in 163,471 subtly varying states of disintegration, none of them identical, all of them unique. You and I, we’ll break down into our component elements in our own special way.