Anatomy of death's mind

The shrill scream of my mother rippled through me like a searing knife. My body flinched and I shuddered at the sound. This wasn’t the right sound one heard at a funeral. No. Screaming, crying, the shouts of grieving, those were expected. But this was too shrill, too high pitched, too alarmed. I instinctively clenched my chest. The beat of my heart made the expansion of my lungs laborious. The air around me stirred and it took me a moment to realize it was just the people around me stirring. Heading for my mother. Somehow, I stood up too, and walked to where she gripped the wall, blanky staring at the casket. Horror was the only landmark of her face, and it only took a simple glance at the resting body to know why. Because the body was in fact not resting but sat up and very wide awake.

I did not react, not immediately, because my body did not feel any urgency, but it only took the body making eye contact with me to illicit a reaction. I gasped; I think. There was too much commotion around me to be able to tell. All I remember was turning around before—

I blinked, and we were leaving.

At home, the grey walls watched as my mother and I walked around one another without discussing anything. Not the funeral, not the body, not my declining mental state, or hers. Not the shell-shocked feeling both of us must’ve been feeling. We never really discuss anything, not in this house. I wrote in my journal once that my tongue was too heavy with everything I had ever thought to say that it became difficult to lift it in the form of a word. I think my mother might’ve felt the same. She never spoke to me about anything other than the mundane.

I spent the day watching her, my eyes heavily trained on her despite their dissociative remembering and reconstruction of the body. I was trying to ascertain how the funeral affected her. Did the body waking up scare her, excite her? Could she stop herself from thinking about it? How was she acting normal? Could I tell her that what I saw did not only terrify me? That somehow, it was becoming an obsession for me, not because it was traumatizing, but because I thought it was fascinating.

Eventually I left her, bustling around the house with the same energy she’s always had, Undampened by anything, because she barely felt. At least that’s what I theorized over the years. The years of my life spent in the silence of the vastness of everything we never got to say. I walked into my room, seeing the eyes of the body on the walls and in the reflections of my mirror and windows. I took my sketch book into my bed, and all I could do was sketch the way the body looked. The way the life it regained made its eyes sparkle. I wondered about the body’s family and how thrilled they must be that their beloved was not dead after all. I did not know what to make of this experience. There had to be a reason, because even if there wasn’t, I have only ever learnt how to overanalyze anything. Obsessive was the word my family had attached to me at a young age, and just like anything you inherit from childhood, it stuck, becoming more of a part of me than anything else.

I drew the body over thirty times, my drawings slowly morphing into more abstract sketches, and somewhere in between the eyes in the casket I lost their shape and somehow, I think they took the shape of my eyes, and then the face, it changed, and it looked like the body was reflecting my own face back at me. Death was no longer a concrete idea, but now felt just as fluid as my sketches. I felt like it resided in me somewhere, as if the body coming to life sent that death into me.

I closed my eyes, letting the pictures from reality along with my sketches swirl through my brain like a whirlpool, until I couldn’t see where my memory of the body started and where my sketches ended. I felt a calm settle over me for a while, but eventually, my feelings made themselves more pronounced. As I waited, trying to process the event, my emotions vibrated through my chest like a high-pitched screech and the body seemed to be clawing around my mind. My ears grew hot as the sounds of the room around me dissipated into silence. A silence that was pierced by a replay of my mother’s scream. Raw and horrific and piercing and now a part of me. I was her scream just as much as I was the death the body escaped. Just as much as I was the body.

I jolted, bringing myself out of the swirling hole my mind was directing me down. I stood up, reorienting myself with the particulars of my room. The air felt the same as it had all day, but it was heavier to breathe when I decided I would walk back into the rest of the house, and head towards where my mother would be. I knew if I never talked to her, she would never talk to me, and on this day, it felt like our silence was harsher than a conversation would be. I decided, a decision that was made for me from the moment I stepped into that funeral.

Eventually, I brought it up to my mother.

“Your scream,” I said. “I understood it, but it haunts me.”

She only stared blankly, just as the body had. Then, she walked away.

I would never find out that in her journal later that night she wrote: “Evelyn revealed that she saw Robert’s body at the funeral sit up. She said he was alive. Apparently, she heard me scream. How long can we go without telling Evelyn? I need to tell her doctor that her hallucinations are now auditory too.”