Cadaver Monument

By Cúan Cusack

A fly stuck to the wall transposed next to the crown of her deathbed. It was easier for me to concentrate on the stillness of the living fly than the stillness of her limp body. The sunlight flowed in through the windows. Her eyes were open. The leaves danced shadows around the room. The leaves dancing delicate bodies projected onto the sheets.

I left after a few Hail Marys. I didn’t believe the words I was saying. No virgin would conceive this suffering willingly. The fly was still stuck to the wall it lasted longer than me in the room. Her body was shrivelled and frail. It had been three days with no water and ten days without food. Only a drop of liquid occasionally sponged to her lips. Her skin was dry and contorted around her bones. She couldn’t speak, she was too weak to be fully conscious. I wonder how much morphine she was on. Whether the constant drip of opium was making death more pleasurable or just prolonging the inevitable.

She was the fundamentals of living without fully being alive. I did not recognise her as she lay there. Experiencing the slow uncoupling of her mind from her body, and her body from being human. The matter in her body forgetting its form in exchange for something new. Her slow, painful dismantling. She is becoming the raw component of existence. The atoms that make her learn a new dance. They begin to relate to each other in strange new configurations.

In town, there is a cadaver monument, a tomb where Katherine Brown and James Rice lie. The black marble tomb depicts a corpse in the process of decomposition. Worms and frogs feasting on its cartoonish body. A testament to the glory of God's decay. Engraved on the side in Latin reads: ‘I am what you will be; I was what you are now.’

Fungi poke through the Romanesque sculpted bones. Eyes carved wide open and ribs exposed. The signifying hides the signifier. A representation of decay containing decay itself. A foreshadowed annihilation, planned and commissioned years before their death. I wondered how Katherine and James’s bones were arranged beneath the heavy lid. Were they intertwined in one another's dust? Did they have small compartments they rested in? Does the char and bone dust remember what it was? In death they have become an attraction. Living, in death as a vague idea of heritage. Both become part of one marble body pawed by tourists.

When she died, she was buried in the soil. I pressed wildflower earrings for her, hidden behind a white wisp of hair. She was enveloped by the rattling of soil on the coffin. When people are dead, they don’t look like themselves, no matter how good the mortician's makeup skills are. It's like your face has forgotten who it was, already turning away into something else. 

I hope one day the wildflowers bloom in the space where she lies. The parts that made her up find a new shape, as a stiff strong breeze or a blunt hedgerow. Maybe she will live on as a dragonfly or as crunchy gravel underfoot. The world is a living tomb, a memento to those whose shape has changed. 

I look in the mirror. My face is sunken. I see a part of her here.

‘She is what you will be; she was what I am now’.