Sarcophagus

My mother flew home the day after my daughter’s funeral, leaving our cupboards filled with American comfort foods. During her stay, she had instituted what became known as the ‘treat drawer’ - where we used to keep all our takeaway menus, until my mother cleared it out and filled it with Swedish Fish and Wine Gums for Barry, Twix bars for me, and Ziploc bags full of boiled sweets, peppermints and caramels for herself, to help her through the days when it was too cold to smoke outside as regularly as she would have liked.

I was entitled to maternity leave; that was at least something. Barry was due to start a new job the day after my mother flew home. Not great timing, even when it looked like things were going to go according to plan. But particularly bad timing now.

Suddenly I was alone all day. I spent a good deal of time walking. The weather had turned wintry and I couldn’t bear to be cold. I bought a padded coat, thermals and woollen socks and big hiking boots, and with my hood pulled tight around my face, and a wool scarf across my nose and mouth, I trudged across Walthamstow marshes. I walked until I nearly reached Springfield Park, and then I would turn back, the little café on the hill there being a popular destination for mother and baby groups.

On one of those first days, returning from my walk to an empty house, feeling the chill of my terror, I opened the kitchen cupboard and took down a can of Heinz Chicken Noodle Soup. It was not something I had eaten since childhood, and not something I would have chosen for myself now, as I hadn’t eaten meat for nearly a decade. But it was the promise of sustaining warmth. It was home, and love.

The broth was thick, fatty and yellow. There were tiny chips of carrot, and little pink cubes of chicken, fuzzy round the edges and spongy from long suspension in liquid.

I wondered how many chickens, or parts thereof, were in this particular can of soup. How many individuals had been rough-and-tumbled into these reconstituted chunks?

When they had died? A month ago? A year ago? How long could you keep a can of soup? How long until the flesh disintegrated completely?

Sometimes my daughter’s death strengthened my commitment to vegetarianism: how could I bear to be complicit in any more death? But at other times, I wondered whether I was coping so badly because, at the end of the day, I was just a squeamish, tree-hugging, vegetarian idealist, unwilling to face up to the cruel facts of life.

Maybe ingesting a little bit of death everyday built up your immunity to it, like a vaccine. Or maybe it was like consuming ‘friendly bacteria’ – taking in something you’d normally be at pains to avoid, because in some forms it’s beneficial. While your own death is unequivocally bad for you, someone else’s death can offer a multitude of health benefits. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

A thought that was always there, pressing in at the edges but too horrible to take shape in words, was that my daughter was meat. Whatever was left of her. I did manage to say to my friend Petra once – the only person in the world I could have spoken to about these sorts of thoughts – “when will she just be bones? How long does it take?”

“You have to not think about that sort of thing, honey. Just shut it down.”

But I couldn’t. I wanted to look it up on the Internet. Several times I opened up an incognito window but couldn’t think how to phrase the search question. When would she just be a skeleton? What about her clothes? What about her little woollen coffin? How long until there was nothing?

I did begin to eat meat. Sometimes when I did, I felt as though I was making a home for someone else’s death. I was taking in their substance as part of my own, acknowledging that I was meat-in-waiting, myself.

Other times, when I ate meat, I did so angrily. Fuck you, cow. Cow, who died in an abattoir, after no kind of life. Because who’s to say the same thing won’t happen to me? Won’t happen to us all? Fuck you, hope. Fuck you, compassion.

I was no longer a vegetarian. I was a thanatophage. A sarcophagus: literally, a flesh-eater. I took a ghastly delight in how apt this felt. I had, after all, contained a dead person. I also held within me the death of a mummy.

Katherine Ahl lives in Cambridge, UK, where she works as a psychotherapist and a reader for The Literary Consultancy.