Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: My Father’s Kidnapping

By CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE NY TIMES

MY father was kidnapped in Nigeria on a Saturday morning in early May. My brother called to tell me, and suddenly there was not enough breathable air in the world. My father is 83 years old. A small, calm, contented man, with a quietly mischievous humor and a luminous faith in God, his beautiful dark skin unlined, his hair in sparse silvery tufts, his life shaped by that stoic, dignified responsibility of being an Igbo first son.

He got his doctoral degree at Berkeley in the 1960s, on a scholarship from the United States Agency for International Development; became Nigeria’s first professor of statistics; raised six children and many relatives; and taught at the University of Nigeria for 50 years. Now he makes fun of himself, at how slowly he climbs the stairs, how he forgets his cellphone. He talks often of his childhood, endearing and rambling stories, his words tender with wisdom.

Sometimes I record his Igbo proverbs, his turns of phrase. A disciplined diabetic, he takes daily walks and is to be found, after each meal, meticulously recording his carbohydrate grams in a notebook. He spends hours bent over Sudoku. He swallows a handful of pills everyday. His is a generation at dusk.

On the morning he was kidnapped, he had a bag of okpa, apples and bottled water that my mother had packed for him. He was in the back seat of his car, his driver at the wheel, on a lonely stretch between Nsukka, the university town where he lives, and Abba, our ancestral hometown. He was going to attend a traditional meeting of men from his age group. A two-hour drive. My mother was planning their late lunch upon his return: pounded yam and a fresh soup. They always called each other when either traveled alone. This time, he didn’t call. She called him and his phone was switched off. They never switched off their phones. Hour after hour, she called and it remained off. Later, her phone rang, and although it was my father’s number calling, a stranger said, "We have your husband."

Kidnappings are not uncommon in southeastern Nigeria and, unlike similar incidents in the Niger Delta, where foreigners are targeted, here it is wealthy or prominent local residents. Still, the number of abductions has declined in the past few years, which perhaps is why my reaction, in the aftermath of my shock, was surprise.

　

My close-knit family banded together more tightly and held vigil by our phones. The kidnappers said they would call back, but they did not. We waited. The desire to urge time forward numbed and ate my soul. My mother took her phone with her everywhere, and she heard it ringing when it wasn’t. The waiting was unbearable. I imagined my father in a diabetic coma. I imagined his octogenarian heart collapsing.

"How can they do this violence to a man who would not kill an ant?" my mother lamented. My sister said, "Daddy will be fine because he is a righteous man." Ordinarily, I would never use "righteous" in a non-pejorative way. But something shifted in my perception of language. The veneer of irony fell away. It felt true. Later, I repeated it to myself. My father would be fine because he was a "righteous man."

I understood then the hush that surrounds kidnappings in Nigeria, why families often said little even after it was over. We felt paranoid. We did not know if going public would jeopardize my father’s life, if the neighbors were complicit, if another member of the family might be kidnapped as well.

"Is my husband alive?" my mother asked, when the kidnappers finally called back, and her voice broke. "Shut up!" the male voice said. My mother called him "my son." Sometimes, she said "sir." Anything not to antagonize him while she begged and pleaded, about my father being ill, about the ransom being too high. How do you bargain for the life of your husband? How do you speak of your life partner in the deadened tone of a business transaction?

"If you don’t give us what we want, you will never see his dead body," the voice said.

My paternal grandfather died in a refugee camp during the Nigeria-Biafra war and his anonymous death, his unknown grave, has haunted my father’s life. Those words — "You will never see his dead body" — shook us all.

Kidnapping’s ugly psychological melodrama works because it trades on the most precious of human emotions: love. They put my father on the phone, and his voice was a low shadow of itself. "Give them what they want," he said. "I will not survive if I stay here longer." My stoic father. It had been three days but it felt like weeks.

Friends called to ask for bank-account details so they could donate toward the ransom. It felt surreal. Did it ever feel real to anybody in such a situation, I wondered? The scramble to raise the money in one day. The menacingly heavy bag of cash. My brother dropping it off, through a circuitous route, in a wooded area.

Late that night, my father was taken to a clearing and set free.

While his blood sugar and pressure were checked, my father kept reassuring us that he was fine, thanking us over and over for doing all we could. This is what he knows how to be — the protector, the father — and he slipped into his role almost as a defense. But there were cracks in his spirit. A drag in his gait. A bruise on his back.

"They asked me to climb into the boot of their car," he said. "I was going to do so, but one of them picked me up and threw me inside. Threw. The boot was full of things and I hit my head on something. They drove fast. The road was very bumpy."

I imagined this grace-filled man crumpled inside the rear of a rusty car. My rage overwhelmed my relief — that he suffered such an indignity to his body and mind.

And yet he engaged them in conversation. "I tried to reach their human side," he said. "I told them I was worried about my wife."

The next day, my parents were on a flight to the United States, away from the tainted blur that Nigeria had become.

With my father’s release, we all cried, as though it was over. But one thing had ended and another begun. I constantly straddled panic; I was sleepless, unfocused, jumpy, fearful that something else had gone wrong. And there was my own sad guilt: He was targeted because of me. "Ask your daughter the writer to bring the money," the kidnappers told him, because to appear in newspapers in Nigeria, to be known, is to be assumed wealthy. The image of my father shut away in the rough darkness of a car boot haunted me. Who had done this? I needed to know.

But ours was a dance of disappointment with the authorities. We had reported the kidnapping immediately, and the first shock soon followed: State security officials asked us to pay for anti-kidnap tracking equipment, a large amount, enough to rent a two-bedroom flat in Lagos for a year. This, despite my being privileged enough to get personal reassurances from officials at the highest levels.

How, I wondered, did other families in similar situations cope? Federal authorities told us they needed authorization from the capital, Abuja, which was our responsibility to get. We made endless phone calls, helpless and frustrated. It was as though with my father’s ransomed release, the crime itself had disappeared. To encounter that underbelly, to discover the hollowness beneath government proclamations of security, was jarring.

Now my father smiles and jokes, even of the kidnapping. But he jerks awake from his naps at the sound of a blender or a lawn mower, his eyes darting about. He recounts, in the middle of a meal, apropos of nothing, a detail about the mosquito-filled room where he was kept or the rough feel of the blindfold around his eyes. My greatest sadness is that he will never forget.

How the compact disc lost its shine

It’s 30 years since Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms began the CD boom. How did the revolution in music formats come about and what killed it?

Dorian Lynskey London Guardian

Thirty years ago this month, Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers in Arms. En route to becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time, it revolutionised the music industry. For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl and passed the 1m mark. Three years after the first silver discs had appeared in record shops, Brothers in Arms was the symbolic milestone that marked the true beginning of the CD era.

"Brothers in Arms was the first flag in the ground that made the industry and the wider public aware of the CD’s potential," says the BPI’s Gennaro Castaldo, who began a long career in retail that year. "It was clear this was a format whose time had come."

As Greg Milner writes in his book Perfecting Sound Forever, the compact disc became "the fastest-growing home entertainment product in history". CD sales overtook vinyl in 1988 and cassettes in 1991. The 12cm optical disc became the biggest money-spinner the music industry had ever seen, or will ever be likely to see. "In the mid-90s, retailers and labels felt indestructible," says Rob Campkin, who worked for HMV between 1988 and 2004. "It felt like this was going to last for ever."

It didn’t, of course. After more than a decade of decline, worldwide CD income was finally surpassed by digital music revenues last year. With hindsight, it’s clear that technological changes had made that inevitable, but almost nobody had foreseen it, because the CD was just too successful. It was so popular and so profitable that the music industry couldn’t imagine life without it. Until it had to.

In 1974, 28-year-old electronic engineer Kees Schouhamer Immink was assigned to the Optics Group of Philips Research in Eindhoven, Holland. His team’s task was to create a 30cm videodisc called Laservision, but that flopped and the focus shifted to designing a smaller audio-only disc. "There were 101 problems to be solved," Immink says. Meanwhile, in Japan, Sony engineers were working on a similar project. In 1979, Sony and Philips made an unpredecented agreement to pool resources. For example, Sony engineers perfected the error correction code, CIRC, while Immink himself developed the channel code, EFM, which struck a workable balance between reliability and playing time. "We never had people from other companies in our experimental premises," Immink says. "It was unheard of. Usually you become foes, but in this case we really became good friends, and we’re still friends after so many years. It was remarkable, actually."

George Martin told us: You can’t smash them, look! And it broke in half

Paul McCartney

In June 1980, after complicated negotiations in Tokyo and Eindhoven, the so-called Red Book set standard specifications for the compact disc digital audio format. The story goes that the size (12cm) and length (74 minutes, 33 seconds) were changed at the 11th hour when Sony’s executive vice president Norio Ohga insisted that the disc should have enough space for the longest recorded performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, his wife’s favourite piece of music, but Immink suspects that is a myth. There were so many technical and financial considerations that it’s unlikely such a key decision came down to one woman’s love of Beethoven.

The CD was introduced to the British public in a 1981 episode of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, in which Kieran Prendeville mauled a test disc of the Bee Gees’ Living Eyes to demonstrate the format’s alleged indestructibility. It caught the public imagination, but Immink found the claim puzzling and embarrassing because it was clearly untrue. "We should not put emphasis on the fact it will last for ever because it will not last for ever," he says. "We should put emphasis on the quality of sound and ease of handling."

(Paul McCartney recently recalled the first time George Martin showed him a CD. "George said, ‘This will change the world.’ He told us it was indestructible, you can’t smash it. Look! And – whack – it broke in half.")

The engineers were evangelical about the CD’s superiority to vinyl and cassette, but the industry and public still needed persuading. "I was not convinced we would be a success at the time because I had seen the failure of the videodisc, which was a nice product, technically speaking," Immink says.

So, in April 1982, representatives of Sony and Philips set off to Billboard’s international music industry conference in Greece with a spring in their step. The record industry was suffering a painful recession ("Is Rock on the Rocks?" asked Newsweek) and this new digital marvel was surely the solution. To the labels, however, it was an invitation to gamble millions of dollars on a potential white elephant: an alien format that was expensive to manufacture and expensive to buy. Jerry Moss, chairman of A&M Records, claimed that the new format would "confuse and confound the customer". It was a rough conference. "There were many black-disc lovers who didn’t want to change and said: ‘We don’t see why we have to go digital,’" Immink says.

At least Sony and Philips had their own record labels – CBS and Polygram, respectively – so they pressed ahead. CBS released the world’s first commercially available CD, a reissue of Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, in Japan in October 1982. Philips missed the production deadline so the international release was put back to March 1983. It’s hardly surprising that only 5.5m CDs and 350,000 players were sold that year when so few titles were available.

Faced with low manufacturing capacity and high costs, labels trod carefully. Jeff Rougvie, who later worked for the pioneering CD-only label Rykodisc, was in retail at the time. He couldn’t even order individual titles from Sony, only a predetermined box of six: "A couple of classical titles, a couple of rock titles and Thriller. And of course you’d sell Thriller and the other five would sit around. Labels thought it was an audiophile-only product that was going to sell primarily to classical music buyers. They did not see it as a mass-market format."

Jon Webster, who worked at Virgin Records between 1981 and 1992, remembers that the label’s first batch of CD releases included Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Phil Collins’s Face Value: albums likely to appeal to affluent early adopters with the means to buy the discs and the expensive players. The first US CD plant, in Terre Haute, Indiana, debuted in October 1984 with Bruce Springsteen’s blockbuster Born in the USA. Enter Dire Straits.

Aware that most consumers didn’t even know what digital audio was, Sony and Philips had launched a promotional campaign on multiple fronts, including advertisements, public demonstrations, product placement, and special promotions for clubs, bars and radio stations. They also courted studio engineers and artists. While analogue loyalists such as Neil Young and Steve Albini railed against translating music into soulless binary code, some high-profile audiophiles felt that this was how music was meant to be heard. On first hearing a CD, the great Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan memorably declared: "Everything else is gaslight."

Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler was an early convert (the second track on Pure, Perfect Sound Forever, the motley 1982 compilation that came free with early CD players, was Dire Straits’ Once Upon a Time in the West). Knopfler insisted on recording Brothers in Arms on state-of-the-art digital equipment, so a promotional partnership was a natural fit. Philips sponsored Dire Straits’ world tour and featured the band in TV commercials with the slogan, attributed to Knopfler: "I want the best. How about you?"

"Brothers in Arms was an iconic release," says Gennaro Castaldo. "The CD came to symbolise the so-called yuppie generation, representing new material success and aspiration. If you owned a CD player it showed you were upwardly mobile. Its significance seemed to go beyond music to a lifestyle statement."

Brothers in Arms coincided perfectly with an economic recovery, more affordable CD players and the music industry’s post-Live Aid uptick. Philips had predicted that annual worldwide sales would surpass 10m that year while Sony anticipated twice that number. In fact, the figure was 61m, rising to 140m in 1986.

Yet the industry was still half-hearted when it came to back catalogue. Rykodisc ("Ryko" is Japanese for "sound from a flash of light") realised there was big money to be made from consumers upgrading their record collections to CD if enough care was devoted to remastering, programming (ie, bonus tracks) and packaging. The newcomer made big back-catalogue deals with Frank Zappa and David Bowie because the majors weren’t interested. EMI, which had first dibs, told Zappa: "No one will ever buy your stuff on CD." "There wasn’t a real good understanding on the majors’ side of what some of this stuff was worth," Rougvie says.

Eventually, even the slowest labels caught on. When Rob Campkin started work at HMV’s flagship Oxford Circus, London, store in summer 1988, the entire CD inventory filled just five five-foot racks. By the following summer, there were almost 40. "In those days, vinyl was very flimsy," he says. "Cassettes were completely disposable. When CD came along and said this will last you a lifetime,customers really did lap it up. It felt new, it felt shiny, it felt exciting."

By the 1990s, the CD reigned supreme. As the economy boomed, annual global sales surpassed 1bn in 1992 and 2bn in 1996, and the profit margins were the stuff of dreams. The CD was cheaper than vinyl to manufacture, transport and rack in stores, while selling for up to twice as much. Even as costs fell, prices rose. "It was simple profiteering," says Stephen Witt, whose new book How Music Got Free chronicles the industry’s vexed relationship with the MP3. "[Labels] would cut backroom deals with retailers not to let the price drop. The average price was $14 and the cost had gotten down almost to a dollar, so the rest was pure profit."

Jon Webster bristles at this claim. "What’s fair? The public says. Supply-and-demand says. There were ignorant campaigns by the likes of the Sun and the Independent on Sunday saying that these things cost a pound to make. Well, that’s like saying a newspaper costs 3p to produce. That doesn’t include the creativity and the marketing and the money it costs to make the actual recordings."

Whether or not the prices were justified, CDs sold in their billions and flooded the industry with cash like never before. This enabled labels to invest more heavily in new talent – Campkin suggests that Britpop might not have happened without the CD windfall – but it also funded misguided A&R frenzies, wasteful marketing and excessive pay packets. "In the 90s we were awash with profitability and became fat, to be honest," says Webster.

Philips and Sony also reaped extraordinary sums from royalties on the discs themselves, including billions of CD-Roms, although none of it reached Immink and his colleagues. Under Japanese law, engineers were entitled to a cut, but their Dutch counterparts had to settle for a salary and a token one-dollar fee for each US patent they filed. "I’m not saying it happened," Immink says drily, "but what could have happened is you work with a Japanese guy from Sony and he can buy a yacht and the Dutch guy has to be happy with one dollar."

As the decade wore on, there were tremors of unease. The industry was running out of albums to reissue, battling over price with supermarkets and big-box retailers, and disturbed by the introduction of CD burners. "Arguably, it’s why they missed the MP3, because they were so concerned about compact-disc burners," says Witt. "If you read corporate literature about forward-facing risks to the business in the late 90s, this is one of the top things they’re talking about, if not the top. And the impact was real. If bootleg discs flood the market they kill sales, no question about it."

Bootleg CDs were a danger the industry could get its head around – you could hold one in your hand. What it couldn’t comprehend was the threat of the MP3: the idea that music could transcend physical formats. "That happened for two reasons," says Witt. "One was they were enjoying unbelievable profits. Two, the studio engineers hated the way the MP3 sounded and refused to engage with it. A lot of artists hated the way it sounded, too." What the audiophiles didn’t realise was that most consumers couldn’t tell the difference. "What was the audio experience before the compact disc?" says Witt. "It was cheap vinyl or an AM transistor radio on the beach, and MP3 sounds better than either of those."

Rougvie suggests a third reason: fierce resistance from retailers who, understandably, considered the MP3 an existential threat. "Distributors and record stores were threatening to return every Ryko title they had, just because we were selling 10 or 12 MP3s every week. If that’s what we were feeling, I can only imagine what kind of pushback EMI or Warners were getting."

Just like their predecessors in Greece in 1982, 90s executives were too busy worrying about the next quarter to consider the next decade. The status quo was perfect, until it wasn’t. "My biggest bugbear about this industry is that they all think short-term," says Webster. "Nobody ever thinks long-term. All these executives were sitting there being paid huge bonuses on increased profits and they didn’t care. I don’t think anyone saw it coming. I remember the production guy at Virgin saying, ‘In a few years, you’re going to be able to carry all the music you want around on something the size of a credit card.’ And we all laughed. Don’t be ridiculous! How can you do that?"

"The MP3 wasn’t just a new format, it was a whole new way of doing things," Castaldo says. "There was also the first dotcom boom and bust, and I remember some people around me saying: ‘I told you it would never take off. That’s not how people want to buy music.’ Obviously a brand-new player like Apple could write the future as it saw it, but the rest of us didn’t have such a blank sheet to start from."

Only a handful of people predicted the CD’s downfall way back in 1982. German computer engineer Dieter Seitzer, the forefather of the MP3, immediately considered the CD "a maximalist repository of irrelevant information, most of which was ignored by the human ear," writes Witt. If music could become digital data, he thought, it wouldn’t be bound by the Red Book. Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. "He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable."

It’s dying. It will go obsolete like the floppy disc did

Stephen Witt

The fall of the CD, like its rise, began slowly. When file-sharing first took off with Napster in 1999 and 2000, CD sales continued to ascend, reaching an all-time peak of 2.455bn in 2000. Tech-savvy, cash-poor teenagers stopped buying them but most consumers didn’t want (or know how) to illegally download digital files on a slow dial-up connection. So the market remained steady, artificially buoyed by aggressive discounting.

It was the 2001 launch of the iPod, an aspirational premium product which made MP3s portable, that turned the tide. "Before that the MP3 was an inferior good," Witt says. "Once you had the iPod, the CD was an inferior good. It could get cracked or lost, whereas MP3 files lasted." Not pure, not perfect, but sound for ever.

The compact disc has proved surprisingly tenacious. It still dominates markets such as Japan, Germany and South Africa; it makes for a better Christmas present than an iTunes voucher; and it has some hardcore enthusiasts. Jeff Rougvie is even planning to set up a boutique CD label to reissue rare and out-of-print albums. "It defies conventional wisdom but so did Ryko at the time. There’s an audience." But, insists Stephen Witt: "It’s dying. It will go obsolete like the floppy disc did. It just always takes a little more time than you’d think."

Rob Campkin recently opened a record shop in Cambridge called Lost in Vinyl. He only stocks a handful of the discs that were once the most lucrative product in the history of music. "Margins are very slim," he says. "I’d have to sell three or four CDs for every one copy on vinyl. It wouldn’t be worth my while."

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt is published by Bodley Head on 18 June.

Updike Country

In the semi-rural suburbs of southeastern PA, finding — and living in — Rabbit Angstrom's middle America.

By Morgan Meis The Smart Set

On a very clear day, blue sky, bright, bright sunlight, you’ll spy an amazing cloud. It is structured like a column. It is dense and white and billows upward, touching the outer limits of the firmament, seemingly. Probably it goes up only a few hundred feet. But the verticality of the cloud is what makes it so inspiring. Just going right up there. Up into the heavens over semi-rural Pennsylvania.

How did this cloud get here, in such an otherwise empty, blue sky? It is a miracle.

They started building the Limerick nuclear power plant in 1974 and it was officially commissioned in 1986. Officially, the plant is called The Limerick Generating Station. Limerick. The name comes from the town. The town is not really a town. Or, at least, I’ve never seen the center of it. There is no locality to the town, just signs as you drive around saying that you’re in Limerick or no longer in Limerick. There is a small, regional airport in Limerick and an outlet shopping center.

Truth be told, the town of Limerick is basically the nuclear power plant now. That is the center. You can see the steam cloud rising over the cooling towers from miles away. It is a useful point of orientation when driving around the windy roads that double back on themselves half of the time.

John Updike always wrote beautifully about this part of the world. The middle class houses. The certain kind of red clay. The specific attitude of a person who grew up around here, in the vicinity of Reading.

If John Updike were still alive and driving around Limerick he’d write something about the beautiful pseudo-cloud coming from the cooling tower of the Limerick plant. He’d say, the white powder of that cloud drifts over the farmland and the strip malls all the same. It dusts the heads of the locals on their way out of the bar on Township Line Road. It dusts everything. You can’t see or feel the dust. It does not harm. But it’s heavy nonetheless. It keeps you here even when you might want to pass on through. If you get caught in the nuclear dust on a fine warm day with a blue, blue sky, you just might lay down for a nap, like Dorothy on the way to the Emerald City. And then you find yourself living in a housing development just under the terrific oblong towers of the plant. You look up to see the cloud day after day. You see it looming on the horizon driving down 422 at night, lit up by the ethereal lights of the surrounding plant structure. You need to be near to the dust and the cloud, for reasons obscure even to yourself.

On the worst days I think that there is nothing to learn about these towns, these places. You ask and you look and you dig things up and it is nothing. Schwenksville, Collegeville, Phoenixville, Limerick, Trappe. Zero. A history forgotten. In the thousands of housing units, nothing. No reason to be here except that someone has to be.

One day I took Mrs. B to get her hair cut. She doesn’t go to a licensed salon. The place she goes is in the back of a local house. The people who own the salon have several businesses, as far as I can tell. They do some trucking, some moving around of things, some hauling of material from here to there.

To get to the salon, you go to the house and walk in through the back porch. There’s no sign. Inside, there’s a room with linoleum and lots of plastic. Plastic that’s been around for a long time and has that special murkiness that comes to old plastic. The room was set up a long time ago and it hasn’t changed since then. The woman who owns the salon talks in such a way that you don’t know what decade it is. The conversation isn’t particular to time. Even talk of politics isn’t specific to political events so much as a political position. The position is that politics are bad and they’ve always been bad and they are probably going to keep being bad.

There’s an old magazine on a wooden stand and the women in the magazine have the same hairstyle as Mrs. B and as the woman who is styling Mrs. B’s hair and as the woman who is just finishing getting her hair set in one of those over-the-head domes that sets your hair, or whatever it does.

The owner/stylist is kind and gentle with Mrs. B’s head. She goes about her business like she knows exactly what to do. And she does know. Mrs. B doesn’t say anything about what she wants or about anything else either. Mrs. B fell asleep for a little while.

Sometimes, men from outside will come in through the side door. The men walk along a passage next to the salon toward another door and go through that door. The men who go that way are always wearing work clothes. They have been doing work outside with trucks and other machines. They never say anything to the women in the salon area. The men look into the salon. They check it out. They take note of the people in the salon. They seem to approve. The look is approving. But there are no words.

I read John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit books many years before I moved to Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Reading where Updike was born. Updike actually grew up in Shillington, which is right outside of Reading. When Updike was 13 years old, the family moved to Plowville, which is even smaller than Shillington and just a few miles south down the 176. Then, Updike went to Harvard and after that to New York City. The rest is literary history, as they say. I’m reading the Rabbit books again now. In the Rabbit books, Updike calls Berks County ‘Brewer County’. But he doesn’t do much work to hide real locations other than changing a few names.

At the beginning of Rabbit is Rich, the third installment of the Rabbit quartet, Rabbit has become the co-owner – with his wife Janice – of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency. That’s why Rabbit is rich. He’s good at selling cars—not a great surprise given Rabbit’s general amiability, his athleticism and good looks.

In the very first paragraph of Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit Angstrom is standing in the display room of Springer Motors watching traffic go by on Route 111. He’s worried that the traffic is light and that the world is running out of gas. Rabbit is Rich was written in the late 1970s and published in 1981. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution had created something of a global panic about oil production. There were gas shortages throughout the US and long lines at gas stations became a regular occurrence. People got in fistfights. Occasionally, someone at a gas station would get shot.

"Gas lines at ninety-nine point nine cents a gallon and ninety per cent of the stations to be closed for the weekend," Rabbit thinks. He remembers that there had just been an incident along the Pottsville Pike where a trucker who couldn’t get diesel started shooting at his own truck.

What jumps out at me in those passages now are the roads. Route 111. The Pottsville Pike. These details were filler for me the first time I read the books. But now I can see them as I read. Route 111 ran up along the Susquehanna Trail from Maryland into Pennsylvania, right up into the Harrisburg area. Since Updike wrote his books, Route 111 has been replaced by Interstate 83. The Pottsville Pike is Route 61, which opened in 1963 and is still Route 61 (sometimes called the Pottsville Pike in places) today.

Route 61, the Pottsville Pike, must have had special resonance for Updike. Route 61 terminates right in the middle of Reading. Or maybe it starts there. Depends on how you look at it. For Updike, in some important way, Reading was the center of the universe. And here is a road, Route 61, the Pottsville Pike, that understands this metaphysical fact. Here is a road that knows that when you get to Reading, there is nowhere else to go.

I avoid going out anywhere near the time of 2pm. That is when things start happening with children. The younger ones get out of school. They have to be picked up and taken somewhere else. The buses head out for the roads. The minivans. It happens quickly. The roads fill up with the swiftness and inexorability of a digital clock beeping its alarm on the kitchen countertop.

It is possible to know what mood someone is in just by the way they drive. By the way they sit at a stop light, inching forward. By the way they edge around your car trying to make a left hand turn into a driveway but finding no break in the oncoming traffic. By the long line of tailgating cars going across the suburban, then rural, then suburban, then rural again roads.

There is a break in the traffic around 3:30. Then begins the evening commute. People coming back in from Philly. People coming home from the industrial parks and the corporate compounds. People coming in from the retail jobs at the big outlet malls. And then at around 7 PM the traffic dies out into silence again. The people are in their homes and the lights from the television shows are flickering in the windows.

This was where the sheep came through, he told me. We were standing in the "third field," roughly an acre of land at the part of the property furthest from the road. You’ve got to walk along the river for a quarter mile or so to get there. At the back of the field is the remnant of a dirt road. Now, fallen trees and scrub brush block the road for anything but foot traffic. Even on foot, you have to climb over broken tree limbs and push aside brambles. No one uses the road but the hunters. They come during deer season mostly, hiding in the bushes along the road, waiting for a buck to make his way through.

Across from the old dirt road is someone else’s field. They grow hay in that field. You can see the round bales stacked to the side of the field during the reaping season. Mr. B is not interested in what happens beyond the confines of his own property. He rarely goes so far as the old dirt road. But after he fixed the clutch on his tractor last summer, he decided to clear the brush on the "third field" in the hopes that a local farmer might pay him a little bit of rent to plant some crops.

We were standing in the middle of the "third field" at the end of summer. Every footstep brought out a swarm of gnats. About a hundred or so gnats with every step, give or take. A sweet smell was drifting in from the east. Some kind of fruit rotting on the ground off in the woods, probably. The sweetness had that under-twang of decomposition.

I asked Mr. B who owned the sheep. Nobody owned them, he said. Some farmer bought them, I don’t know who. But they got away. Or the farmers got tired of feeding them and just let them go. They went feral, anyway. What do you mean, feral, I wanted to know. They went wild. They roamed around from property to property. This is where they would walk, nearly a hundred sheep at the height of it. You would see them walking along the ridge there too (he pointed to the horizon). They had their paths. It was all farmland in those days, mostly. The sheep knew how to get from one field to another. No one owned them. They would travel around.

You can get in trouble for letting sheep go feral, Mr. B told me. You can get sued by other farmers for aiding and abetting. The sheep eat the crops in the fields. And if you give them safe haven, you are aiding and abetting. Crop theft.

Mr. B aided and abetted for a while. Then, the farmers in the area took action. They got some men together with rifles and tracked the sheep down. They shot the feral sheep one by one until they were all dead. I didn’t say anything. Mr. B. just kept walking along, back toward the house.

I didn’t want to get sued over them, he said.

A few of the feral sheep paths are still out there, at the back of the property. They are the last trace of a time when, in the summer, you could have stumbled upon hundreds of sheep doing not very much, munching on crops that they did not plant and had no right to eat. Giving not a sheep’s shit about whose land they were besmirching. Using the paths that they’d created to go just where they pleased.

In a little essay for The Guardian about rereading the Rabbit novels 20 years after his first go, Julian Barnes claims that the books made him "increasingly aware of this underlying sense of things being already over, of the tug of dying and death."

Rabbit talks like that in the beginning of Rabbit is Rich. Rabbit thinks to himself, "the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending."

But the American roads around here have only gotten bigger and more filled with cars since Updike wrote his books and died. The gas scares of the 1970s and early 80s went away. New gas scares came and also have gone. Route 422 was built and then expanded and now they are expanding it again. When Rabbit is finally dying at the end of Rabbit at Rest, his kid Nelson is screaming and crying. "Don’t die, Dad, don’t," the kid cries. Rabbit knows he has to say something. He says, "Well, Nelson, all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad." •

This Is What Happens After You Die

By Moheb Costandi | Mosaic Magazine                                                                             
                                                

      

 

(Photo: © Lightning + Kinglyface and Jess Bonham)

Most of us would rather not think about what happens to our bodies after death. But that breakdown gives birth to new life in unexpected ways, writes Moheb Costandi.

“It might take a little bit of force to break this up,” says mortician Holly Williams, lifting John’s arm and gently bending it at the fingers, elbow and wrist. “Usually, the fresher a body is, the easier it is for me to work on.”

Williams speaks softly and has a happy-go-lucky demeanor that belies the nature of her work. Raised and now employed at a family-run funeral home in north Texas, she has seen and handled dead bodies on an almost daily basis since childhood. Now 28 years old, she estimates that she has worked on something like 1,000 bodies.

Her work involves collecting recently deceased bodies from the Dallas–Fort Worth area and preparing them for their funeral.

“Most of the people we pick up die in nursing homes,” says Williams, “but sometimes we get people who died of gunshot wounds or in a car wreck. We might get a call to pick up someone who died alone and wasn’t found for days or weeks, and they’ll already be decomposing, which makes my work much harder.”

John had been dead about four hours before his body was brought into the funeral home. He had been relatively healthy for most of his life. He had worked his whole life on the Texas oil fields, a job that kept him physically active and in pretty good shape. He had stopped smoking decades earlier and drank alcohol moderately. Then, one cold January morning, he suffered a massive heart attack at home (apparently triggered by other, unknown, complications), fell to the floor, and died almost immediately. He was just 57 years old.

Now, John lay on Williams’ metal table, his body wrapped in a white linen sheet, cold and stiff to the touch, his skin purplish-grey – telltale signs that the early stages of decomposition were well under way.

Self-digestion

Far from being ‘dead’, a rotting corpse is teeming with life. A growing number of scientists view a rotting corpse as the cornerstone of a vast and complex ecosystem, which emerges soon after death and flourishes and evolves as decomposition proceeds.

Decomposition begins several minutes after death with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down. This usually begins in the liver, which is rich in enzymes, and in the brain, which has a high water content. Eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way. Damaged blood cells begin to spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins, discoloring the skin.

Body temperature also begins to drop, until it has acclimatized to its surroundings. Then, rigor mortis – “the stiffness of death” – sets in, starting in the eyelids, jaw and neck muscles, before working its way into the trunk and then the limbs. In life, muscle cells contract and relax due to the actions of two filamentous proteins (actin and myosin), which slide along each other. After death, the cells are depleted of their energy source and the protein filaments become locked in place. This causes the muscles to become rigid and locks the joints.

During these early stages, the cadaveric ecosystem consists mostly of the bacteria that live in and on the living human body. Our bodies host huge numbers of bacteria; every one of the body’s surfaces and corners provides a habitat for a specialized microbial community. By far the largest of these communities resides in the gut, which is home to trillions of bacteria of hundreds or perhaps thousands of different species.

The gut microbiome is one of the hottest research topics in biology; it’s been linked to roles in human health and a plethora of conditions and diseases, from autism and depression to irritable bowel syndrome and obesity. But we still know little about these microbial passengers. We know even less about what happens to them when we die.

In August 2014, forensic scientist Gulnaz Javan of Alabama State University in Montgomery and her colleagues published the very first study of what they have called the thanatomicrobiome (from thanatos, the Greek word for ‘death’).

“Many of our samples come from criminal cases,” says Javan. “Someone dies by suicide, homicide, drug overdose or traffic accident, and I collect tissue samples from the body. There are ethical issues [because] we need consent.”

Most internal organs are devoid of microbes when we are alive. Soon after death, however, the immune system stops working, leaving them to spread throughout the body freely. This usually begins in the gut, at the junction between the small and large intestines. Left unchecked, our gut bacteria begin to digest the intestines – and then the surrounding tissues – from the inside out, using the chemical cocktail that leaks out of damaged cells as a food source. Then they invade the capillaries of the digestive system and lymph nodes, spreading first to the liver and spleen, then into the heart and brain.

Javan and her team took samples of liver, spleen, brain, heart and blood from 11 cadavers, at between 20 and 240 hours after death. They used two different state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technologies, combined with bioinformatics, to analyze and compare the bacterial content of each sample.

The samples taken from different organs in the same cadaver were very similar to each other but very different from those taken from the same organs in the other bodies. This may be due partly to differences in the composition of the microbiome of each cadaver, or it might be caused by differences in the time elapsed since death. An earlier study of decomposing mice revealed that although the microbiome changes dramatically after death, it does so in a consistent and measurable way. The researchers were able to estimate time of death to within three days of a nearly two-month period.

Javan’s study suggests that this ‘microbial clock’ may be ticking within the decomposing human body, too. It showed that the bacteria reached the liver about 20 hours after death and that it took them at least 58 hours to spread to all the organs from which samples were taken. Thus, after we die, our bacteria may spread through the body in a systematic way, and the timing with which they infiltrate first one internal organ and then another may provide a new way of estimating the amount of time that has elapsed since death.

"Degree of decomposition varies not only from individual to individual but also differs in different body organs," says Javan, "Spleen, intestine, stomach and pregnant uterus are earlier to decay, but on the other hand kidney, heart and bones are later in the process." In 2014, Javan and her colleagues secured a US$200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate further. “We will do next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics to see which organ is best for estimating [time of death] – that’s still unclear,” she says.

One thing that does seem clear, however, is that a different composition of bacteria is associated with different stages of decomposition.

Bloating. (Photo: © Lightning + Kinglyface and Jess Bonham)

Putrefaction

Scattered among the pine trees in Huntsville, Texas, lie around half a dozen human cadavers in various stages of decay. The two most recently placed bodies are spread-eagled near the centre of the small enclosure with much of their loose, grey-blue mottled skin still intact, their ribcages and pelvic bones visible between slowly putrefying flesh. A few meters away lies another, fully skeletonized, with its black, hardened skin clinging to the bones, as if it were wearing a shiny latex suit and skullcap. Further still, beyond other skeletal remains scattered by vultures, lies a third body within a wood and wire cage. It is nearing the end of the death cycle, partly mummified. Several large, brown mushrooms grow from where an abdomen once was.

For most of us the sight of a rotting corpse is at best unsettling and at worst repulsive and frightening, the stuff of nightmares. But this is everyday for the folks at the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility. Opened in 2009, the facility is located within a 247-acre area of National Forest owned by Sam Houston State University (SHSU). Within it, a nine-acre plot of densely wooded land has been sealed off from the wider area and further subdivided, by 10-foot-high green wire fences topped with barbed wire.

In late 2011, SHSU researchers Sibyl Bucheli and Aaron Lynne and their colleagues placed two fresh cadavers here, and left them to decay under natural conditions.

Once self-digestion is under way and bacteria have started to escape from the gastrointestinal tract, putrefaction begins. This is molecular death – the breakdown of soft tissues even further, into gases, liquids and salts. It is already under way at the earlier stages of decomposition but really gets going when anaerobic bacteria get in on the act.

Putrefaction is associated with a marked shift from aerobic bacterial species, which require oxygen to grow, to anaerobic ones, which do not. These then feed on the body’s tissues, fermenting the sugars in them to produce gaseous by-products such as methane, hydrogen sulphide and ammonia, which accumulate within the body, inflating (or ‘bloating’) the abdomen and sometimes other body parts.

This causes further discoloration of the body. As damaged blood cells continue to leak from disintegrating vessels, anaerobic bacteria convert hemoglobin molecules, which once carried oxygen around the body, into sulfhemoglobin. The presence of this molecule in settled blood gives skin the marbled, greenish-black appearance characteristic of a body undergoing active decomposition.

As the gas pressure continues to build up inside the body, it causes blisters to appear all over the skin surface. This is followed by loosening, and then ‘slippage’, of large sheets of skin, which remain barely attached to the deteriorating frame underneath. Eventually, the gases and liquefied tissues purge from the body, usually leaking from the anus and other orifices and frequently also leaking from ripped skin in other parts of the body. Sometimes, the pressure is so great that the abdomen bursts open.

Bloating is often used as a marker for the transition between early and later stages of decomposition, and another recent study shows that this transition is characterized by a distinct shift in the composition of cadaveric bacteria.

Bucheli and Lynne took samples of bacteria from various parts of the bodies at the beginning and the end of the bloat stage. They then extracted bacterial DNA from the samples and sequenced it.

As an entomologist, Bucheli is mainly interested in the insects that colonize cadavers. She regards a cadaver as a specialized habitat for various necrophagous (or ‘dead-eating’) insect species, some of which see out their entire life cycle in, on and around the body.

Bursting. (Photo: © Lightning + Kinglyface and Jess Bonham)

Colonization

When a decomposing body starts to purge, it becomes fully exposed to its surroundings. At this stage, the cadaveric ecosystem really comes into its own: a ‘hub’ for microbes, insects and scavengers.

Two species closely linked with decomposition are blowflies and flesh flies (and their larvae). Cadavers give off a foul, sickly-sweet odor, made up of a complex cocktail of volatile compounds that changes as decomposition progresses. Blowflies detect the smell using specialized receptors on their antennae, then land on the cadaver and lay their eggs in orifices and open wounds.The smell of death

Each fly deposits around 250 eggs that hatch within 24 hours, giving rise to small first-stage maggots. These feed on the rotting flesh and then molt into larger maggots, which feed for several hours before molting again. After feeding some more, these yet larger, and now fattened, maggots wriggle away from the body. They then pupate and transform into adult flies, and the cycle repeats until there’s nothing left for them to feed on.

Under the right conditions, an actively decaying body will have large numbers of stage-three maggots feeding on it. This ‘maggot mass’ generates a lot of heat, raising the inside temperature by more than 10°C. Like penguins huddling in the South Pole, individual maggots within the mass are constantly on the move. But whereas penguins huddle to keep warm, maggots in the mass move around to stay cool.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Bucheli explains, surrounded by large toy insects and a collection of Monster High dolls in her SHSU office. “If you’re always at the edge, you might get eaten by a bird, and if you’re always in the centre, you might get cooked. So they’re constantly moving from the centre to the edges and back.”

The presence of flies attracts predators such as skin beetles, mites, ants, wasps and spiders, which then feed on or parasitize the flies’ eggs and larvae. Vultures and other scavengers, as well as other large meat-eating animals, may also descend upon the body.

In the absence of scavengers, though, the maggots are responsible for removal of the soft tissues. As Carl Linnaeus (who devised the system by which scientists name species) noted in 1767, “three flies could consume a horse cadaver as rapidly as a lion”. Third-stage maggots will move away from a cadaver in large numbers, often following the same route. Their activity is so rigorous that their migration paths may be seen after decomposition is finished, as deep furrows in the soil emanating from the cadaver.

Every species that visits a cadaver has a unique repertoire of gut microbes, and different types of soil are likely to harbor distinct bacterial communities – the composition of which is probably determined by factors such as temperature, moisture, and the soil type and texture.

All these microbes mingle and mix within the cadaveric ecosystem. Flies that land on the cadaver will not only deposit their eggs on it, but will also take up some of the bacteria they find there and leave some of their own. And the liquefied tissues seeping out of the body allow the exchange of bacteria between the cadaver and the soil beneath.

When they take samples from cadavers, Bucheli and Lynne detect bacteria originating from the skin on the body and from the flies and scavengers that visit it, as well as from soil. “When a body purges, the gut bacteria start to come out, and we see a greater proportion of them outside the body,” says Lynne.

Thus, every dead body is likely to have a unique microbiological signature, and this signature may change with time according to the exact conditions of the death scene. A better understanding of the composition of these bacterial communities, the relationships between them and how they influence each other as decomposition proceeds could one day help forensics teams learn more about where, when and how a person died.

For instance, detecting DNA sequences known to be unique to a particular organism or soil type in a cadaver could help crime scene investigators link the body of a murder victim to a particular geographical location or narrow down their search for clues even further, perhaps to a specific field within a given area.

“There have been several court cases where forensic entomology has really stood up and provided important pieces of the puzzle,” says Bucheli, adding that she hopes bacteria might provide additional information and could become another tool to refine time-of-death estimates. “I hope that in about five years we can start using bacterial data in trials,” she says.The tell-tale fly

To this end, researchers are busy cataloguing the bacterial species in and on the human body, and studying how bacterial populations differ between individuals. “I would love to have a dataset from life to death,” says Bucheli. “I would love to meet a donor who’d let me take bacterial samples while they’re alive, through their death process and while they decompose.”

Unraveling. (Photo: © Lightning + Kinglyface and Jess Bonham)

Purging

“We’re looking at the purging fluid that comes out of decomposing bodies,” says Daniel Wescott, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Wescott, an anthropologist specializing in skull structure, is using a micro-CT scanner to analyze the microscopic structure of the bones brought back from the body farm. He also collaborates with entomologists and microbiologists – including Javan, who has been busy analyzing samples of cadaver soil collected from the San Marcos facility – as well as computer engineers and a pilot, who operate a drone that takes aerial photographs of the facility.

“I was reading an article about drones flying over crop fields, looking at which ones would be best to plant in,” he says. “They were looking at near-infrared, and organically rich soils were a darker color than the others. I thought if they can do that, then maybe we can pick up these little circles.”

Those “little circles” are cadaver decomposition islands. A decomposing body significantly alters the chemistry of the soil beneath it, causing changes that may persist for years. Purging – the seeping of broken-down materials out of what’s left of the body – releases nutrients into the underlying soil, and maggot migration transfers much of the energy in a body to the wider environment. Eventually, the whole process creates a ‘cadaver decomposition island’, a highly concentrated area of organically rich soil. As well as releasing nutrients into the wider ecosystem, this attracts other organic materials, such as dead insects and fecal matter from larger animals.

According to one estimate, an average human body consists of 50–75 per cent water, and every kilogram of dry body mass eventually releases 32 g of nitrogen, 10 g of phosphorous, 4 g of potassium and 1 g of magnesium into the soil. Initially, it kills off some of the underlying and surrounding vegetation, possibly because of nitrogen toxicity or because of antibiotics found in the body, which are secreted by insect larvae as they feed on the flesh. Ultimately, though, decomposition is beneficial for the surrounding ecosystem.

The microbial biomass within the cadaver decomposition island is greater than in other nearby areas. Nematode worms, associated with decay and drawn to the seeping nutrients, become more abundant, and plant life becomes more diverse. Further research into how decomposing bodies alter the ecology of their surroundings may provide a new way of finding murder victims whose bodies have been buried in shallow graves.

Grave soil analysis may also provide another possible way of estimating time of death. A 2008 study of the biochemical changes that take place in a cadaver decomposition island showed that the soil concentration of lipid-phosphorous leaking from a cadaver peaks at around 40 days after death, whereas those of nitrogen and extractable phosphorous peak at 72 and 100 days, respectively. With a more detailed understanding of these processes, analyses of grave soil biochemistry could one day help forensic researchers to estimate how long ago a body was placed in a hidden grave.

New Life. (Photo: © Lightning + Kinglyface and Jess Bonham)

Burial

In the relentless dry heat of a Texan summer, a body left to the elements will mummify rather than decompose fully. The skin will quickly lose all of its moisture, so that it remains clinging to the bones when the process is complete.

The speed of the chemical reactions involved doubles with every 10°C rise in temperature, so a cadaver will reach an advanced stage of decomposition after 16 days at an average daily temperature of 25°C. By then, most of the flesh has been removed from the body, and so the mass migration of maggots away from the carcass can begin.

The ancient Egyptians learned inadvertently how the environment affects decomposition. In the predynastic period, before they started building elaborate coffins and tombs, they wrapped their dead in linen and buried them directly in the sand. The heat inhibited the activity of microbes, while burial prevented insects from reaching the bodies, and so they were extremely well preserved. Later on, they began building elaborate tombs for the dead, in order to provide even better for their afterlife, but this had the opposite of the intended effect –separating the body from the sand actually hastened decomposition. And so they invented embalming and mummification.How nature can mummify a brain

Embalming involves treating the body with chemicals that slow down the decomposition process. The ancient Egyptian embalmer would first wash the body of the deceased with palm wine and Nile water, remove most of the internal organs through an incision made down the left-hand side, and pack it with natron (a naturally-occurring salt mixture found throughout the Nile Valley). He would use a long hook to pull the brain out through the nostrils, then cover the entire body with natron and leave it to dry for 40 days. Initially, the dried organs were placed into canopic jars that were buried alongside the body; later, they were wrapped in linen and returned to the body. Finally, the body itself was wrapped in multiple layers of linen, in preparation for burial. Morticians study the ancient Egyptian embalming method to this day.

Back at the funeral home, Holly Williams performs something similar so that family and friends can view their departed loved one at the funeral as they once were, rather than as they now are. For victims of trauma and violent deaths, this can involve extensive facial reconstruction.

Living in a small town, Williams has worked on many people she knew or grew up with – friends who overdosed, committed suicide or died texting at the wheel. When her mother died four years ago, Williams did some work on her, too, adding the final touches by making up her face: “I always did her hair and make-up when she was alive, so I knew how to do it just right.”

She transfers John to the prep table, removes his clothes and positions him, then takes several small bottles of embalming fluid from a wall cupboard. The fluid contains a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol and other solvents; it temporarily preserves the body’s tissues by linking cellular proteins to each other and ‘fixing’ them into place. The fluid kills bacteria and prevents them from breaking down the proteins and using them as a food source.                                              

Williams pours the bottles’ contents into the embalming machine. The fluid comes in an array of colors, each matching a different skin tone. Williams wipes his body with a wet sponge and makes a diagonal incision just above his left collarbone. She ‘raises’ the carotid artery and subclavian vein from the neck, ties them off with pieces of string, then pushes a cannula (thin tube) into the artery and small tweezers into the vein to open up the vessels.

Next, she switches the machine on, pumping embalming fluid into the carotid artery and around John’s body. As the fluid goes in, blood pours out of the incision, flowing down along the guttered edges of the sloped metal table and into a large sink. Meanwhile, she picks up one of his limbs to massage it gently. “It takes about an hour to remove all the blood from an average-sized person and replace it with embalming fluid,” Williams says. “Blood clots can slow it down, so massaging breaks them up and helps the flow of the embalming fluid.”

Once all the blood has been replaced, she pushes an aspirator into John’s abdomen and sucks the fluids out of the body cavity, together with any urine and faeces that might still be in there. Finally, she sews up the incisions, wipes the body down a second time, sets the facial features and re-dresses it. John is now ready for his funeral.

Embalmed bodies do eventually decompose. Exactly when, and how long it takes, depends largely on how the embalming was done, the type of casket in which the body is placed and how it is buried. Bodies are, after all, merely forms of energy, trapped in lumps of matter waiting to be released into the wider universe.What is a ‘natural’ burial?

According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. In other words: things fall apart, converting their mass to energy while doing so. Decomposition is one final, morbid reminder that all matter in the universe must follow these fundamental laws. It breaks us down, equilibrating our bodily matter with its surroundings, and recycling it so that other living things can put it to use.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

This story first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.