on missing flights and missing organs

on life's unsanitized endings

How do you imagine your death?

Dear reader, so many folks I’ve spoken to have fantasies of either dying in their sleep or in a room filled with white light and surrounded by their families.

Contrast that with how you typically experience death in your day to day life.

You don’t? What do you mean ‘I don’t experience death in my day to day life’.

This for humans is an odd and relatively recent experience only occurring in the last hundred or so years when most of us moved from farms to cities and lost our relationships with the animals we eat.

But still, death is all around you.

It lurks in the shadows and black boxes placed by Rentokil and contain nerve agents, warfarin or sticky paper - all designed to keep you safe from the many rodent born illnesses that plague humanity.

You smell the stench of animal fat rising from the seemingly limitless fast food restaurants that you pass every day.

And if you do any amount of driving, highways are littered with crows, fucking no good fucking happy they’re dead fucking racoons, porcupines and others. On the last hundred mile ride I even passed a beaver on the roadside by the airport.

It seemed sad that it missed its flight somewhere.

Now?

It’s in a better place - the bellies of the crows that were ripping it to shreds.

Life is a giant buffet.

Somedays we’re at the table.

And one day?

We’ll be on the table.

I may not be food for crows, but given long enough the maggots would make short work of my little meaty skin suit.

Yes dear reader, this is another morbid post, another post about my dearly departed hen Jellybean.

You see, whatever ate her, only ate her organs. It ate the good stuff and left the rest for the worms.

Who am I to complain?

She’s fed me eggs for over a year.

They were tasty.

I hope that whatever ripped her to shreds enjoyed her as much as I have.

Bleak eh?

I’m sorry.

But poor Jellybean, she didn’t die on a stainless steel table with an IV in her paw like Winkey did.

She didn’t die under the Christmas Tree like Dudley did.

Naw,

Her last moments were filled with adrenaline, horror and struggle.

She was the rooster who took on the racoon to save her sisters.

I don’t blame her.

If someone broke into my house late at night?

I’d grab a knife and meet them at the door.

I’d go down fighting.

Dying peacefully in bed?

That’s a nice fantasy.

But for most of human history, neither births nor deaths were pleasant experiences for anyone involved.

But biology doesn’t care if you’re uncomfortable about this fact.

Because in the end?

We’re all worm food waiting to happen.