I WAS IN A MONASTERY IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICO, high in the mountains near Abiquiu. It was February. Behind the chapel there was an open grave, the red soil mounded up beside it. “Has a brother died?” I asked a monk. “No,” he answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”
An open grave is an open mouth. It disturbs the soil, throwing the wet cold subsoil to the surface. It exhales all the suggestion of the dark. But a grave is also the place where the foul is made fair. It is the way that flesh returns to the generative womb.
The grave seems to interrupt the human story. But the fact is that graves are motherly for the Earth. They wrap up the things of time and deliver them back to the cradle. So that the show goes on. So that nothing will stop the stories from being told.
In this regard, every tomb is empty in the long run. “Putrefaction is the Worke of the Spirits of Bodies,” wrote the English Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon, “which euer are Unquiet to Go forth, and Congregate with the Aire, and to enjoy the Sunbeames.” Everything wants out. Everything wants to see the sun.
This is not the way it usually seems to us. The folk stories of the grave are full of pale green glows that rise from the tomb, of corpses that sit bolt upright in the grave, of coffins that explode from the evolved gases of decay. The imagery of demons and of hell itself are drawn from the sight of decomposing corpses: lips drawn back, eyes bulging, the skin roiling like an ocean and turning livid pink, black, and green.
But there are other stories that share Bacon’s wisdom. In a fairy tale collected by the Grimm brothers, called “Brother Lustig,” Saint Peter is called upon to bring a dead princess back to life. To do so, he cuts up her corpse and boils the limbs in a pot, until the flesh falls away, leaving clean bones. Like starched white sheets or a wedding dress, the white bones suggest a readiness to receive once more the complications of the flesh, with all its odors and its staining.
Whitman wondered why diseased corpses, when buried in the ground, did not poison the Earth. “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?” he wrote. Yet he concluded in awe at the Earth: “It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor.”
Long before Whitman, however, the ninth-century Persian physician Rhazes had intuited this truth. Whenever he sought a site for a new hospital in Baghdad, he brought along a piece of fresh meat. Burying it in the ground, he measured its rate of decomposition, and where the flesh rotted fastest, there he placed the infirmary. It is now thought that the chosen sites were especially high in penicillium, the common soil bacteria from which the drug penicillin is derived. Francis Bacon likewise knew that a shovelful of “churchyard Earth,” the soil of graves, would speed putrefaction and regeneration.
While we live, we ourselves are inhabited. A full ten percent of our dry weight is not us, properly speaking, but the assembly of microbes that feed on, in, and with us. Our bodies are the kitchens where our food is cooked, digested, and then burned to cook us. We live until death in a perpetual fever, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. When at last we are well done, we begin to cool, becoming food ourselves. More and more ordered, more and more stable, like a good piece of roasted meat, we are made ready. At death, the cornea clouds over, like the eyes of a cold fish, the sign that our first diners are at table.
Decomposition is already under way, though rigor mortis suggests the opposite. The body stiffens, as though to resist decay, but this is simply a sign that the oven has been turned off. One might think that the dead would relax, but for all that exhausted generations have sought rest in the grave, this is not the case. What happens is that the ATP, a phosphorus-rich molecule whose burning provides the muscles with power, runs out and is not replenished. If a person has had a protracted and painful death, the ATP may already be almost gone, so that on dying, they freeze in the precise posture of the last moment of their lives. Dead muscle contracts; it is an effort for living muscle to relax. In order to relax we must burn.
The softening that begins soon after in the corpse has nothing to do with relaxation. Bursting from the thin-walled lysosomes inside each cell, the enzymes that regulated metabolism now metabolize what they had labored to build. They become “autocatalytic,” that is, “self-breaking.” (This is also what happens when you pound a tough piece of meat to tenderize it. The pounding breaks cells, whose enzymes escape and begin to decay the meat.)
At the same time, the bacterial partners living in the intestines turn from symbionts into parasites, devouring what they had maintained. The capillaries and the tree structures of the blood and lymphatic systems are the roads along which they travel as they spread throughout the body. First come the air-breathing bacteria who exhaust the remaining oxygen in the corpse. They are followed by the masses of anaerobes, which break up proteins, releasing the sulphur that gives the “foul corpse” its cheesy, putrid odor.
The body acquires a bubbling, creeping softness. The metabolism of the bacteria creates gases that swell the belly, making the flesh billow as they migrate along the planes of the tissues. Indeed, in the days when people died at home, you could use this gas to test if a person had departed. The idea was to apply a lighted match to the big toe. Dead or alive, the toe would blister, but if the person was truly gone, the blister would fill with gas and burst.
Over time, the same bubbling and bursting occurs all over the skin as it turns shades of yellow, red, and green. Eyes bulge, the tongue protrudes, and at last the bloated belly ruptures.
All this activity makes the body a more acid environment, propitious for the growth of fungi whose blooms begin to appear on the surface of the skin. Insects and their larvae colonize the remains. Murray G. Motter’s gruesome and exhaustive study of 150 corpses exhumed in Washington, D.C., during 1896–97, counted thousands of fly larvae, beetles, true worms, and mites. One large corpse that had been buried for four years was, he noted, “fairly alive with mites, thysanura, beetles and larvae, working on the surface of the cadaver, under clothing.”
Unexpected creatures appear in the grave. Springtails are wingless insects that like to live in our lawns, usually at a depth of only a few inches. If they sense a corpse, however, they will readily travel the six feet down to get it. And even in a triple-lined coffin with the inner box of lead, one discovers the proliferating larvae of the clothes moth.
Each grave is like a city beneath the soil, until at last the remains have been reduced to the clean white bones. All the tissues have fed this vast, tiny life that cures its diseases and converts it into rich soil and free air. Even after more than thirty years, Motter could still find intact bones in the grave, though they crumbled to powder at a touch.
The founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, and his wife were buried side by side. Later, an apple tree was planted near the grave. When, decades later, the citizens went to find the bodies to rebury them with honor, it was discovered that they had wholly decayed. Not even the bones were left. A nearby apple tree had wound its roots around the corpses, sucking up the phosphorus of the bones and weaving in living roots the shapes of the dead man and wife.
So in the end the tomb is empty, and human forms have been changed into apple forms. The soil of graves is the transformer. It is natural magic. The grave is a memory from which the story of the Earth is told.
But not even the soil of graves is safe from our distempered technologies. Since Egyptian times at least, people have sought to preserve the body against decomposition. The history of food preserving here parallels the history of burial. Salting, pickling, freezing, drying, honey-curing, flaying, bleeding, and eviscerating were all practiced by the earliest Mediterranean civilizations to preserve both meats and the dead. (Our most common practice and the one most responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer, freezing, was pioneered by Francis Bacon, who died of it. He was carried off by a chill caught while collecting snow to cool a chicken.) Sometimes the preservation served ritual ends; sometimes it was for convenience. Alexander the Great was shipped back from Babylon in a vat of honey. The British naval hero Lord Nelson returned from Trafalgar in a keg of rum.
None of these practices destroyed the soil, though they retarded the work of the decomposers. But Thomas Holmes, known as the father of modern embalming, made his fortune by poisoning the dirt. A Civil War mortician, Holmes ran a thriving business by injecting the bodies of dead Union officers with formaldehyde and shipping them home for burial. Thus, every captain could be his own Admiral Nelson or Alexander, his iconic features preserved for the admiration of the mourners.
Formaldehyde embalming is now common around the world, and is often legally required. The idea is to preserve the living from contagion, but the reverse has been the result. A dead body, messy as it becomes, is not toxic in itself, but formaldehyde is. It coagulates proteins in the corpse and in any creature that tries to consume it. Densely packed churchyards are now so full of formaldehyde that they pollute the surrounding waters. Ignoring the soil’s own work, we destroy it and harm ourselves.