The smell of death

The phrase “the smell of death” carries a whole new meaning for me today.

To those who have never experienced it, it sounds like a poetic way of saying “a really bad smell.” Poetic, but perhaps overdramatic. I don’t know about you, but I always figured, hey, it can’t be so bad, right? Touching a corpse? Smelling one?

Holy mama, was I wrong. Today was my first experience actually touching a dead animal. It was a very young baby deer. It was hit by a car a few days ago.

The girl I was working with has been on this job for five years—she had her first time, as well. And she’s also been there for a lot of other people’s first experience with a rotting carcass. She’s also a psychology major. So she understands and appreciates that, no matter a person’s disposition or “prior record” (as she put it), there is no way to tell how you will react to that situation until you are smack in the middle of it.

I gagged. I had tears in my eyes. I had to walk away and come back about four times. I had to look away as I carried him. Heather thought I was going to faint. All the while she asked, “Are you OK?” And every time, I answered, “Yup. Let’s get him.” It took me a few more trips to the side of the road trying not to puke, and the spoken words, “I need your help to do this” (and if you know me well, you know that if you tell me you need my help, you get it. The end.), but we finally got it into the truck.

We drove around for a while, looking for a decent “resting place” (without the public seeing. Rule number one: do not let civilians see you with a dead deer. It’s like watching Bambi for the first time. Or that scene in Napoleon Dynamite with the cow and the kids on the school bus) for him. We gave him back to the earth, and I’m sure the other animals will take care of him soon.

I got back in the truck all covered in this awful, clammy sweat and rested my head on the steering wheel before I could drive. Heather finally said, “You did good. A lot of people break their first time.”

I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t the idea of a dead fawn that was getting to me, it was the smell.

The smell of death clings to you. It crawls to the back of your throat and stays there like a lump that you can’t get rid of, unless you cry. It seeps into your skin and weighs on you. The smell aside, I was a little troubled.

It’s not death that bothers me, it’s the absence of life. A body that was once animated, full of life and breath, remains, but everything that made it what it meant to you is gone. That wasn’t a deer on the side of the road, it was a carcass. Wakes and funerals are like that, too. You look at a body, one that you were always happy to see because a soul that you loved was enshrined within it. But every reason that you were ever happy to see it is gone from it. All that’s left is a deteriorating, smelling mess.