The Decomposition of Grief

Mathilde sat at the kitchen island, staring at the plate of dry toast she’d made for her husband. It had been sitting there for five days now. The bread had gone stale and cold, as hard as the porcelain plate it sat on. They had picked those plates out together; deep, navy blue to match their kitchen backsplash. Now, he would never eat from them again.  

It had been five days since he died. Five days since he kissed her on the cheek in their shared kitchen, walked out their back door, and never walked back in. He’d gone out to fix the wind chimes that had tangled in the storm that had rolled in a couple of nights prior. She smiled at him through the window as he set the ladder up outside it. 

 I’ll be back in by the time you put the bacon on, he’d said. 

Shortly after she turned back to the stove, she heard the rubber sole of his shoe slip on the wet rung of the ladder, a grunt, and a loud crack, followed by a thud. She rushed outside to find him lying on the concrete, head bleeding from a gash on his right temple. His head cracked against the birdhouse when he fell. 

Everything after was a blur. She could hardly recall how the 911 call went. Freak accident. Dead in seconds. Her eyes glazed over as the paramedics spoke to her. She didn’t hear them; she only heard the bacon she’d left on the stove, sizzling as it burnt to a crisp in the pan, and the dull smack of his head knocking against the wood, then the ground. 

Five days after the accident, she could still see him. He appeared everywhere, at every waking moment. He stood in the kitchen, sat on their sofa, lay by her side. His body was stiff, and his glassy eyes stayed fixed on her, just as they stayed fixed on the sky when she found him. Blood still dripped from the gash on his head. 

She didn’t mind the presence; he was still there, still the same Jonah. If she ignored the silence and the stillness of the spectre, it was like he’d never really left, never really died. She couldn’t be a widow if her flesh and blood husband was still there, even if the flesh was dead and ashen, and the blood was stagnant, pooling in his arms down to his fingertips. Livor mortis couldn’t trump love. 

At least to her, he wasn’t truly gone yet, and that’s all that mattered. She’d pry her eyes open if she had to, anything to make sure the vision of him stayed and he wouldn’t vanish in a blink. But every time she blinked, or turned around the corner, he remained. Like the plate of toast still sitting on the counter, he too would stay. And nothing could make her let him go. 

The funeral came and went a week later. It had been twelve days since the accident, and the illusion was beginning to spoil around the edges. Her vision of Jonah was changing. Though the wound on his head no longer bled, the edges had turned black and begun to slip away, reveal the dark tissue underneath the flesh. Greenish marbling crawled up the column of his neck underneath his shirt, and his eyes became a milky, hazy white. Still, she could tell that his eyes were on her, even if she could hardly see them through the film. 

Mathilde, like her mother, was a mortician. It was the family business, and she learned the trade as soon as she was old enough to know what death was. The funeral home was home to her. When her mother died, she had overseen the funeral preparations herself, washing, cleaning, and dressing her mother’s body with meticulous care. She didn’t trust anyone else to do it, and knew she would be the best one for the task. It was her final act of love, to make sure that everything was perfect. 

For Jonah’s funeral, though, she couldn’t do it. The idea of seeing him inanimate, as meat on a slab, manipulated and prodded into a suit - it sickened her, made bile rise to the back of her throat. Questions about what color he should wear or what she wanted his casket to look like were met with short, snappish answers, if she answered at all. Having to think about the details reminded her of the unfairness of having to consider them at all. He shouldn’t be in a box; he should be alive, standing and laughing and talking with her, making light-hearted jokes over the formality of it all like he used to. 

The funeral itself was uneventful. As she gave her eulogy, she saw his face in the crowd. His face was puffy, and the skin sagging around his cheeks almost made him look like he was smiling wryly at her. The same slight smile he’d give her as he’d nudge her shoulder, telling a joke. She gripped the microphone tighter and kept her eyes down, jaw clenching as she spoke. In his casket, he looked the way she remembered him ‌that morning. He looked calm, almost as if he were sleeping. The mortician who took over her had a heavier hand with the makeup; she could see the caking around his temple where his head met the edge of the wooden birdhouse, and she could make out where the restorative wax ended and his actual skin began. Even in its imperfection, it was a far cry from the putrefied image of her husband that lingered at the edges of her vision. 

In the days following the funeral, bodies filtered in and out of the house, offering condolences, leaving plates of food in the fridge, and floral arrangements on the counter. The phone rang incessantly on the hook. More condolences, more apologies, pity and tears that Mathilde wanted no part of. The voices on the other end seemed to drone like cicadas in her ear, buzzing away about how sorry they were. “Sorry” was a meaningless word. The first few dozen utterances did nothing to bring him back, so what good was another dozen? She bit back the urge to say that if she heard one more person say “sorry” she’d fucking snap, and thanked each person for the well wishes, useless as they were. 

The quiet house left nothing but room for her thoughts. She’d lie awake at night in their empty bed, gazing out into the darkened backyard. The wind chimes, still tangled, glinted in the porch light. It lazily swung in the breeze, occasionally hitting the side of the house, tapping against the wood. The dull thud reminded her of that day, the sound of him falling. The last thing he ever saw. 

She couldn’t take it anymore. 

She bolted out of bed, striding through the house and throwing the back door open as she stormed into the backyard. As soon as she saw them, she ripped the wind chimes down, throwing them into the grass with a clatter. Still, it wasn’t enough to quell the rage that was finally bubbling to the surface. She whipped around to see the birdhouse. On the corner of its little roof, she could see the rusty brown stain from where it had connected with Jonah’s head. She grabbed one of the deck chairs and raised it over her head, smashing it into the side of the birdhouse, knocking it off ‌its post. It didn’t matter that he had built the birdhouse by hand when they first moved there, or that she had enjoyed watching the robins and cardinals build their nests in the spring there. In her mind, it delivered the killing blow, so damn those cardinals, and damn that birdhouse. Over and over, she raised it up, then slammed the chair into the wood until there was a crater in the center of the roof, screaming and sobbing all the while. 

When she finished, her chest heaved. She dropped the deck chair atop the splintered remains of the birdhouse unceremoniously and raised her eyes from the wreckage. There Jonah was, looking at her from the bedroom window. His head drooped to the side, and his eyes cast an accusatory gaze, even as they rotted out of the sockets and spilled onto his cheeks like tear tracks. A sick sense of shame swirled in her stomach. There were no more birdhouses to smash, no more wind chimes to tear down, nothing left to absorb her anguish. She went back inside with Jonah.

The house became a festering prison of misery. Mathilde could swear she smelled the decay mixed with the cloyingly sweet, chemical smell of formaldehyde. She turned the thermostat down to 45 degrees to keep it at bay and lit candles in every room. Her visions of Jonah remained, but now his skin hung from his body like a mottled blanket. She could no longer bear to see him. 

She kept the TV on at all hours, not wanting to take her eyes off it for a moment and risk seeing him as he rotted away. The noise of infomercials and daytime TV gave her something else to look at and fixate on other than him, and the burning questions rolling around in her head. Once again, she replayed the events of Jonah’s death, turning every detail over in her mind. What if he hadn’t gone out to fix the wind chimes? What if the birdhouse hadn’t been there? What if there had been no storm at all to tangle the wind chimes or leave the ladder wet in the first place? The what-ifs didn’t matter; they couldn’t alter the absence or change the circumstances. But they were all she had, besides his body.

Weeks bled into months. She had long since stopped counting the days since Jonah died. She saw less and less of him; she slept through the days when she didn’t feel like she was sleepwalking through them, and as his body degraded, there was even less of him to see. He was like a shadow on the wall, a silhouette at the border of her vision. Darkened rings of putrid fluid marked the spots where he used to be; on the carpet, on their bed, staining the wooden floors. She felt like a gaping wound, bleeding around his absence. Whenever she saw him now, it was in bits and pieces - his voice in distant, fuzzy fragments, strands of his sandy brown hair, flashes of his smile. She almost wished it was still the corpse appearing to her; at least then she didn’t feel as alone. 

The world of the living had always felt alien and frustrating to Mathilde, but at least with Jonah, she had someone to traverse it with, a hand to guide her through it all. Now, there was no one and nothing, not even decay to keep her company. 

The months continued to pass. Life moved on. The seasons changed without him to witness them. Fall gave way to winter, melting away to spring. The spring brought back birdsong. She listened through the kitchen window and reflexively thought of telling Jonah that the robins and cardinals would be returning soon to build their nests before she hesitated, remembering that he wasn’t there to tell. He hadn’t been there for a while. The empty space he left behind felt less like a chasm and more like a pit; still there, but surmountable, crossable, even. She decided that if she couldn’t tell him, she would show him.

The shattered birdhouse had lain on the lawn through the fall and winter. The paint had peeled, and the exposed wood was rotting in some spots, but it wasn’t unfixable. She’d made a project out of its repair, worked at it as meticulously as she would prepare a body at the funeral home. She spent weeks sanding and repainting it before finally nailing it back to the post. It stood proudly, restored to the way it was when Jonah had built it all those years ago, the yellow paint glowing in the sunlight. 

She no longer saw the corpse, standing in the doorway or rotting into sludge on their shared sofa, but still, she managed to see him again. She could see his umber eyes in the dark potting soil as she planted new petunias in the garden beds they had once tended together, and heard his laugh in the chirp of the cardinals that landed by the window. The apparition was gone, no longer haunting her vision, but he lingered all the same, dwelling in the little things. The decay had run its course, and new life had returned to flourish in its wake.