How I Tricked Myself Into Thinking I’d Be Better off as Dirt

This is Better Living Through Chemistry, a column by Ariana Remmel on how atoms and molecules can help us explore our lives.

A plump green lima bean lay on a moist paper towel in front of my biology teacher. All the seventh graders in my Episcopalian school gathered around her. We were about to learn about plants and how they grow—that this little bean would soon sprout its first tender leaves that would reach toward the sun—but the teacher had a question for us first: “If you have two seeds that are exactly the same in every way down to their molecular structure, but one is made by God and the other made by man, would both of them grow?”

“Of course they would!” I said, eager to show off my middle-grade science knowledge.

But the teacher shook her head in disappointment. “Only God can bestow the gift of life. Nothing can live without a soul,” she told me. “That is why life is a miracle.”

As a god-fearing child, I wanted to believe her. Yet I tried in vain to find my divine soul, to point to it somewhere in my body. Was it in my heartbeat? My blood? Maybe it was hidden in the electricity running through my nerves. It bothered me that I could not find it because I needed my soul to get into heaven, at least according to my mother and Sunday school teachers.

Yet I couldn’t point to heaven either. And as I grew older, I became more invested in what I could perceive with my own senses than in cultivating faith in an unknowable deity. I spent more time in science class and less in Mass. I put down my Bible in favor of chemistry textbooks. My search for evidence of divine machinations was replaced by an endless curiosity about what the world was made of.

Eventually, the question of my soul—whether I had one and where I could find it—became a moot point. Life was not so much a miracle as a complex process of building up and breaking down organic matter. As such, I came to believe that my life would end when my body stopped doing its own chemistry. Then my remains would dissociate into their component parts. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There would be no afterlife for me.

*

The belief that death would be quiet and dark and silent was a great comfort to me. My childhood was not a happy one, and my adolescence only grew the ache in my heart as my muscles strained to keep pace with my elongating bones. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with myself, like I was adrift at sea. On good days, I believed that I could do anything. On bad days, every choice I made felt equally meaningless. Trapped in an endless cycle of anxiety and exhaustion, I decided that I just had to get through this one life. Then, perhaps, I could rest in peace.

I put down my Bible in favor of chemistry textbooks.

What comfort I took in life often came from walks through nature. I grew up in the woods, searching for crawdads in frigid creeks and catching fence lizards in my bare hands. I marveled at the birds who traveled freely on the wing. Though I once respected these beings as creatures of God, I later came to appreciate them as kin from different branches of the same evolutionary tree.

If there was one perk to being alive, it was feeling like I was part of the circle of life. Through millions of years of evolution, carbon born in the hearts of stars made flesh of plants and beasts and me alike. The smell of pine trees and moist soil was evidence that I was part of the cosmic cascade of organic molecules through our universe. No one tells the flowers how to don the deepest purples. No one tells the birds how to sing from the highest branch.

And while I know that these creatures flee from my clumsy footsteps out of fear of being eaten, I also understand that their lifeless forms will go on to feed other beings. Their carcasses reconfigured into delicious rot that nourishes the next generation—a noble purpose even in death.

Perhaps I too would find purpose in decomposition. Maybe at the end of my conscious existence, my body would be useful as nutrients. I made a kind of game out of cataloguing my body’s atoms—this self-contained ocean of biochemistry—and compounding the budget by which this living form might be transformed in death. Each time I played, I imagined new routes that my atoms might take on their way back into the flow of the cosmos. This made sense to me. There is no escaping death, and so I was reassured that at least someday my body would have an unequivocal purpose. But what to do until then?

*

My mother’s gift to me is corpse pose. She tells me that I spend too much time in my head, that my worry is a perversion of my active imagination. Mama thought yoga might help her anxious child, and so I learned to soothe the roiling currents of my mind by playing dead.

When the pounding of my heart feels like the frantic knocks of a storm-stranded traveler, I lie on my back; limbs splayed gently to each side, I allow my body to sink into the floor. The gentle creaking of my bones feels good as the joints realign themselves with the force of gravity dragging me toward the center of the earth. Oh, how lovely to be a corpse. How lovely to have not a care in the world but to be heavy and splayed out on the ground.

As my mind unravels alongside the tension of my muscles, I can almost feel the wildflowers pushing through my rib cage. The tiny bones of my wrists and ankles are scattered by mice and coyotes and young weasel kits. A vulture gliding on thermals high above descends in gentle circles toward the fragrant cornucopia of my exposed organs. His bald head digs into the slippery cavity of my abdomen to pick at my liver. Once he has taken his fill of me, the bird of carrion alights once more. I become the flowers and the vulture and the soil microbes simultaneously—and there is nothing left of me in death but more life. Oh, how lovely.

My mother has since come to rue my exuberant embrace of her innocuous gift. Though she has made it clear that the disposal of my corpse is not a topic of polite conversation, I am still compelled to afflict this discussion on my loved ones, nonetheless. Cremation has always seemed such a waste of my body’s nutrients (why be a greenhouse gas when I could be vulture food?), and the thought of having my blood replaced with embalming fluid also runs counter to my desire to be consumed. Though I’d prefer to be buried swiftly in a shallow grave where the carrion scavengers would find me quickly, this would only be possible at specialized facilities. Further, the logistics seem like too much trouble to put my family through in the case of my untimely passing. Which leads me to my current choice.

There are now facilities in Washington and other states that can safely and efficiently compost human remains. The deceased are placed in a special casket where microbes convert the remains into rich black earth within a matter of weeks. It’s perfect—or at least the next best thing to being vulture food. My mother is an avid gardener and named me for her favorite rose; it brings me peace to imagine her tending such a flower with the help of my matter if I die before her.

*

A small consolation during the pandemic is that I have spent more time in my garden now that I work from home. Inspired, I tried to make my own compost in the backyard with food scraps and yard clippings. I filled a tumbling barrel with nitrogen-rich greens and carbon-rich browns, then aerated the mixture every few days by turning the handle. It radiates heat from the combustion of organic molecules—a sign of the blooming community of living microbes.

Meanwhile, I spend my daylight hours on phone calls and video conferences accompanied by the constant dings of slack notifications and emails. My mind overflows with an endless list of deadlines, small tasks only partially completed, and production schedules dictated by corporate bosses I will never meet. I love the work that I do, but it is hard to get motivated about my professional goals going into year three of a global pandemic as the climate crisis ravages the natural world I love so dearly. I miss traipsing through the forest, marveling at insects under decaying logs. I miss feeling like I’m part of the circle of life instead of a consenting participant in its destruction.

I look to the compost pile through my office window and wonder at the productivity of microbes. Oh, to be warm and rotten and full of grubs! Perhaps the compost is more alive than I am. Nothing about staring into a screen makes me feel alive. Not like the smell of moist compost. Nor the sweet juice bursting from the fruits of my refuse transformed.

If I think about life as a self-sustaining cycle of organic chemistry—of the processes by which organisms consume matter, break it down, and build new biological molecules for their growth and reproduction—then there’s not a huge distinction between microbes and fly larva and the gardener who tends them. Which leads me to question if there is actually a chemical basis to distinguish between the biological usefulness of my living body now and the corpse I hope to someday compost. Alive or dead, my flesh retains a fairly consistent inventory of organic matter.

With my conception of life and death thus blurred, I risk believing that maybe I truly would be better off as dirt.

*

Somewhere between the surging pandemic, the intensifying climate crisis, and the endlessly churning news cycle, I fall ill. Racked with fever, my body shivers uncontrollably in the summer heat. I feel my bowels transformed into a writhing knot of electric eels while my head throbs to the rhythm of my pulse.

With my conception of life and death thus blurred, I risk believing that maybe I truly would be better off as dirt. 

In my fevered delirium, I try to bring my body into corpse pose. I try to soothe my screaming nerves, to stifle the moans that escape from my throat unbidden, by summoning the quiet of death. But I cannot.

My muscles revolt, and I cry out against the pain. Perhaps my commensal flora and fauna have already begun to consume me. Perhaps this is the embodied experience of rot. It seems only a matter of time before passion vines erupt from my sternum, wrapping supple tendrils around each joint of my skeleton. It is agony.

“This pain is your body fighting,” I hear myself whisper in a moment of lucidity. “This pain is your body fighting to stay alive.”

The revelation crashes into me like a wave. I can feel the currents of my blood running through my veins. My nerves buzz with the electricity. For a brief moment, I envision my mother planting a rose in the garden. Reaching deep into a clay urn of moist earth, her hands are stained with black compost. And I know then that I have made a terrible mistake.

It is all well and good to imagine being a corpse—to contemplate the meaning of life through the lens of death—but the work of living is a different matter entirely. It was suddenly clear that the true experience of death is as intangible as my soul. But I have unwittingly created a false idol: I tried to find my purpose in my own version of life after death. I tried to construct heaven out of carbon and naivete.

*

In the series finale of The Good Place, two lovers contemplate death. One says to the other: “Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it: its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there and you can see it. You know what it is. It’s a wave.” But soon the wave crashes to the shore and it’s gone.

Yet the water remains. The ocean still gleams endlessly toward the horizon. “The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while,” he tells his beloved.

I imagine that many people understand this Buddhist parable to be a metaphor for the soul. I take it more literally. The idea that my body could be a wave of organic molecules—just a different way for atoms to be—this is where I found some solace. But that solace was never enough.

The molecules that make my flesh are themselves a remarkable coalescence of the life that came before me, and there is no shame in wondering where they will venture next. But what good does it do me to fixate on how my atoms will return to the cycle when I am already part of the cycle now? What use is it to the people I love if my organs are quickly broken down into compost or if my cremated ashes are pressed into diamond or if my liver is consumed by vultures? What use is any of that to me or them if I cannot figure out in life how to show them that I care?

How could I ever have believed that I would be more useful to them as dirt than flesh?

I have learned a great many things about the world by taking lessons from chemistry. And as someone who is soothed by the certainty of measurements, I am grateful for the game of counting my atoms. But these atoms cannot endow me with a purpose—they are ill-suited to my spiritual pursuits. When I denounced my belief in a divine plan in favor of an unyielding confidence in the laws of nature, I wish I’d held onto the possibility for miracles—not as an endowment of an omnipotent god, but to create space so I can appreciate the true gravity of life. Because I have found the scale of atoms to be far too small.

It would be unwise to define a wave by simple measurements of its crest and trough, just as it was unfair for me to reduce my existence to my body’s component parts. Yet there is equal danger in staring endlessly out to the horizon. I have already spent too much time constraining my usefulness to the crash—to that glorious return to open water. But if I’m not careful, I’m going to miss the wave altogether—and perhaps there is purpose enough in learning how to ride it.

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