“That’s okay. I’m not dying to try it.”
I raise a brow. “I see what you did there,” I say. “There’s also a living forest.”
“Where I’m buried and a tree grows over me?”
“More like the cremains are used to mulch the trees. The hot new thing is recomposition—human composting. It’s being pitched for urban centers where there isn’t space for cemeteries.”
“What about donating my body to science?” Win asks.
One of the things I notice most about talking to those who are dying is that they’re eminently practical. They know they have a checklist to tick off, and many people are ready and willing and able to discuss it with objectivity, a weird dual state where they know they are the one who will be gone, but they also want to make sure they have the agency to decide how that is going to happen. One of the other things I notice most about talking to people who are dying is that this conversation rarely happens in front of a loved one, as if one of the last acts of grace you can perform with your death is to protect your spouse from the nuts and bolts of the process.
“Donating to science is definitely an option,” I tell Win, “but you need to be aware that if you do that, a lot of stuff may happen to your body that you’re not thinking about. True, you may wind up as a med school cadaver. But you’re just as likely to become filler for lip and butt implants, or be a crash test dummy, or decompose on a farm in Virginia for students of forensics.”
She shudders. “I do not want to wind up in someone’s ass crack.”
She means it as a joke, but that’s not how I hear it. “When people say that sort of stuff,” I begin delicately, “it tips me off that they think that body and spirit are one. That a part of you is still going to be here, after you die.”
She raises her face to mine, and I see it: the awareness that the road just…ends. That there’s no promise of anything coming after, at least not as far as we have proof.
“It’s a bummer, if not,” Win says. “I’d like to go to my own funeral. Eavesdrop on who’s saying nasty shit about me.”
“I had a client who wanted to be at her funeral, so she held it before she died. People gave eulogies and she clapped along with everyone else. She danced and she drank and she had a phenomenal time.”
“You candothat?” Win says, shocked.
“We,”I correct, “can do anything. There’s no template.”
“I used to joke around and tell Felix I wanted Snow White’s hermetically sealed glass case, until I went to the British Museum and saw the mummies. I don’t think I’m enough of an exhibitionist for that, even if I looked good for being four thousand years old.”
The last mummy I had seen was in the Egyptian necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel; the body of a wealthy girl named Isadora, who lived during the Roman reign of Egypt in the second centuryC.E. She fell in love with a soldier from Antinopolis on the east bank of the Nile, but her father didn’t approve. She wanted to elope, but the boat overturned while she was going to meet her soldier, and she drowned. According to Ancient Egyptians, anyone who drowned in the Nile was automatically madehesy,orthe blessed dead. Her devastated father built an elaborate tomb for her in the desert, a small stone building with crumbling steps. Inside the tomb were ten lines of Greek elegiac couplets:To tell the truth, they are the nymphs, the water nymphs, who raised you, O Isidora.
Isadora was preserved at the site in a glass case. I remember the smooth, resined bulb of her skull; the gap of her open mouth and the glint of her teeth, the pinch of a nose. The narrow neck, rising from the modest white sheet that covered her from collarbone to ankle. Her toes peeping out.
When I visited her tomb, Wyatt was with me.
I shake my head, dislodging his name, and force my attention back to Win. “Egyptians didn’t get mummified just to look good,” I say. “It was a way to control decomposition of thekhat,the corpse. In order for an Egyptian to reach eternal life, the body had to last forever and house the soul. It mirrored the path of the sun god Re, who became one with the corpse of the Osiris every night before he was reborn the next morning.”
“How did they do it?” Win asks.
“Priests would remove the organs—and put them in canopic jars that got buried with the body. There were gods who watched over them—Qebehsenuf, the falcon, guarded the intestines; Hapy, the baboon, had the lungs; Imsety, a person, protected the liver; and Duamutef, the jackal, had the stomach. The brain was taken out through the nose. The heart was left in place, because to the Ancient Egyptians, it was the seat of all personality and intelligence. Then the body was packed with natron, a kind of salt, and padded with linen, before getting wrapped in hundreds of yards of the stuff. Sometimes amulets and prayers and spells were tucked inside or written on the bandages. The wrappings were coated with resin, and wrapped again, and the last layer was a shroud. The whole thing took seventy days.”
“To dry out?”
“Yeah, but also because of a star, Sothis, which disappeared from the sky for that amount of time before coming back during the annual flooding of the Nile. Death, rebirth, you get it. Then asempriest—usually the eldest son—performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, which let the deceased eat and drink and speak and have sex in the afterlife. The mummy was put in a coffin or coffins, and the burial chamber was sealed shut. That is, until some archaeologist decided thousands of years later to move it to a museum.”
The mummy room in the Cairo Museum is always the most crowded. There are tons of pharaohs there—from Ramesses II, to Hatshepsut, to Seti I, whose body is in such good shape that he looks like he’s taking a nap. There’s a mummified king who died in battle, who has a hole above his eye that matches a foreign ax blade. The whole thing always felt creepy to me—a stream of tourists who were basically Peeping Toms. “So much about Egyptian tombs was meant for people to explore and to celebrate their lives—but they never intended for us to see their mummified bodies,” I say. “That was private.”
When I finish, I realize that Win’s been listening to my diatribe with increasing wonder. “What came first? Death or Egypt?”
I blink. “What?”
“That’s your thing,” she says softly.
“My what?”
“Your thing. Egypt. That’s what made your heart beat. Mine was art.” She leans back against the couch. “Do you know who Marina Abramovicis?”
I shake my head.
