Of Bone and Memory

Every day I check on the progress of the decomposing deer skeleton that has washed ashore just down the beach. Tufts of fur cling to parts of the hind leg near the sharp onyx hoof, but it’s mostly bone that is exposed. The lower jaw is lined in teeth so infinitesimal they seem no more than the plastic tines on a Barbie hairbrush. The skull sprouts two devil-like protrusions that intimate the promise of antlers. The neck and head are still cloaked in plucked pale skin that is water-logged and stretched out. 

It’s too wet for the body to dry out and break down fully, and it lives this part of its death in a slow-motion process that teases my patience, my morbid fascination. I go to gape. I go for curiosity. I go for respect. I go to test my courage to drag it out of the water and help its slow walk to decomposition, but I’m too timid to touch one of its ribs, or heaven forbid one of its heartier legs. Which I see today are unbroken and slim, but mostly detached at the upper joints as though they might float away from the body. It is the literal description of the word “disembodied” and not just the way I sometimes feel. Or is the word to describe it “dismembered”? And if that is the right word, maybe I sometimes feel that way too—like I’m no longer a part of the whole, no more a member. I take a stick from nearby and try to prod the skeleton but the stick is as sodden as the rest of the beach and it bends against the slightest pressure, those waxy ribs like a cage still stronger than the elements that surround it. 

I think that this skeleton needs a heat wave, a vast desert of arid heat. I think it needs to be sun bleached, exposed to elements that will make it crack apart, that will make its skull an ivory relic. But here, on this sandy shore, this arrangement of sinew and bone is tucked in for sleep by every wave that rolls over it like a soft blanket swaddling. It is tucked in for a long slumber, and tucked into a time warp. 

Me too. I feel tucked into a time warp. My mind bends around memory the same way it stays present. Which mainly means it all feels jumbled. I confuse my childhood with my children’s; I confuse my motherhood with my mom’s.

I remember when I was a little girl, and the first time my mom tucked me into bed by billowing my blankets out above me and letting them parachute down on me. It was the most exciting of feelings: a tiny thrill of expectation, the slight shivers, the sudden softness. The feeling of something so familiar experienced in a different way (wild, and bending and unmade) made me consider everything anew. I knew exactly how tight tucked-in covers felt, and now here they were—cool and rumpled and delicious on top of me—and I realized I didn’t know anything at all. 

I report back to the uninterested after every walk. I tell them about the body at the shore. The current state of its decay. I confess my impatience at it. I confess that it’s because I want part of the skeleton, because I want the skull. Because I imagine it a durable trophy from this time, something I’ll never forget; because I want to be like Georgia O’Keeffe—some thoughtful enthusiastic who contemplates transience artistically, someone who finds meaning in bone.

But just admitting the desire to maim and own feels violent, so when he offers to tear the skull off the body for me I touch his arm to pull him back, even though he has made no actual movements toward the offense of this thing that lies helpless. There is no life there, not anymore—and that is why, somehow, in slow death, life hovers over the body like a sacred memory. 

It’s the holiness of that that prevents me from the desecrated deed. I offer my patience like an unspoken prayer to the filaments of time, an act of obeisance toward the slow crawl of nature. I remember how to bow my head. But this feels different. Sturdier somehow; unveiled, and raw.

I’m quelled by that. I figure that if I was supposed to have the skull, I would have happened upon this skeleton in a different form. Fragmented already, and done, and clean from the elements of its life-giving parts. For a few days, I get distracted from the want. I read and read, sometimes out loud to the kids—those Newbery novels that tug at your heart and seem to always be about animals—and poetry and essays for me. And with everyone else I love, there are Marco Polos and Zooms and FaceTime: faces on screens (and I’m delighted and can’t stop smiling), but nothing to touch. My mom texts me pictures: a black and white one of Joan Didion smoking a cigarette when she is young, thick beads snaking around her neck and down her baggy pale shirt; then a picture of a recipe for lemon bread; then pictures of her (my mom’s, not Joan’s) garden too, in color—the blooming orange orchids, and something else that is profuse and purple.

I am thrown by the simplicity of this—by the way a blossom makes a stem arc, by what must be almost imperceptible (non)heft, and by the beauty of it all. 

One late morning, I finish a long walk from a shuttered town three miles away to the deer’s resting spot along the shore. It has taken me a while to get there—here—and I feel late for no reason at all. As I approach, the sun hides itself and the clouds release a shower along the shore. It feels almost warm out, and then suddenly the sky is weeping. No matter. The deer skeleton still stands whole. I breathe in the smell of rain on rocks.