By Olivia Flynn
My first experience with death that I remember was in an October long gone when my parents told me my grandma was dead. I was five, and it didn’t mean very much to me then, both because I didn’t really know my grandma and I didn’t really know death. As a five-year-old I had a remarkably Grecian imagination when it came to dying—I pictured, though I’m not sure why, that death had something to do with being rowed in a boat to somewhere far away.
I used to frighten myself with that imagery, though now I think that’s less because I found the image frightening and more because I was slowly discovering the instinctive human fear of death. We think of death, the greatest unknown, the most certain uncertainty, with a sense of reverent dread. The word death itself triggers a limbic reaction—a tight chest, a sudden stillness or wordlessness, a weight, a consciousness of pulse, of breath. Oh, the ultimacy, the infinity, the inevitability.
We have a word for people and things that are incredibly concerned with death: morbid. Six letters that cast an autumn-like gloom over morticians and grave diggers, scavengers and carrion, supernaturalists and Edgar Allan Poe. Autumn itself is a season of orange and crimson death, and I once told my friend that I think it would be lovely to die in some far October so that I can have a fall funeral, so that I can fade with the trees. Oh, the aesthetic.
She, naturally, thought this was somewhat concerning and asked about my mental health.
But is it morbid, really, to look ahead at the inevitable end and hope that at least it’s something lovely? I do admit that I think about death often. I don’t know an elegant way to explain my fascination with death, except that I always feel a need to reassure people that I am not fascinated with dying. Simply death itself.
Death, like digestion and respiration and reproduction, is a biological process, one of many, and in that, it is not unique. I suppose what makes it distinct is that life goes on during digestion and respiration, and we certainly hope it goes on after reproduction, but death, as I said, is ultimate. A culmination of a lifetime of biological processes that your body won’t continue any longer. This, naturally, is upsetting, although from a practical standpoint it is simply human nature to die.
Sometimes death is not death, the biological process, but Death. This must be part of human nature, too, because across time and space, cultures have breathed life into Death, a figure of flesh and bone and will. Some of these personifications are friendlier than others. Mexican Santa Muerte, Our Lady of Holy Death, wears colorful robes and guides spirits safely to the afterlife, but Lithuanian Giltinė, a skeletal goddess dressed in white, kills you and collects your soul herself. Some personifications are also more or less passive. Irish Cù Sìth, a hound, simply foretells death, and Breton Ankou rides around in a cart to collect the souls of the dead. On the other hand, Japanese Shinigami, monster-like deities, invite humans towards death, sometimes even possessing people to die.
I suppose giving death a corporeality and a soul helps to ease the sting, at least in the sense that it gives us someone to blame. We are always looking for someone to blame, a focus for our grief and anger and existentialism. But as far as easing the fear, well—I would much rather picture death as a biological process than as a skeletal Lithuanian goddess coming to claim my soul.
Yes, I would much rather think of death in a biological sense. We see it every day—flies crumpled on the windowsill, freshly-trimmed blades of grass fading on the sidewalk. In the last century, World War II killed eighty million people and Vietnam killed two and a half million; AIDS has killed forty-two million and COVID-19 has killed seven million. In 2022, Ukraine had the highest mortality rate in the world, with 21 of every 1,000 people dying. Not that I would say I am desensitized to death, but there is a straightforwardness to the biology of it that I crave, especially because, more often than not, death is anything but straightforward.
And yet, even in the biology of it I find a certain poetry. When I visit my grandma’s grave, I picture her bones beneath me, the varnished oak of her casket long since rotted, grass roots stretching down to pry between crevices in the moist earth. I picture the change of her body, from something warm and pulsing to something ancient, whispery, long past.
One day, my own body will change like that. An article I read once said that death is the last thing our bodies do for us. I enjoy thinking about death in this way. My organs, having spent their entire existences keeping me alive, will finally give me the gift of metamorphosis. One final act of service. Even in death, my body will love me.
I wonder which of my organs will go first, and whether it will really be a going or more of a soft acceptance. When people begin to die, they slowly lose their appetite as their bodies lose the strength to digest. I think, then, that my stomach will still first, its lining tired, stretched thin. My intestines, finding themselves for the first time without something to do, will follow quietly. One by one, other organs will take their leave—kidneys, bladder, spleen. They will encourage my lungs gently, the same way a mother coaxes a child into sleep. My lungs will hesitate—they know what they hold within their layers of cartilage and bronchi and alveoli—but they will also know it is time. They will sense it in the silence of the rest of my body. They will expand one last time, then deflate slowly, clinging to the final exhale. And then my heart, never able to work alone, will relax and fall still.
Without airflow, without blood, my brain will fade within minutes, and my very existence will slip beyond reach of flesh.
What will I want to feel in those last moments? What will I want to hear? I used to cry thinking about one day having to coax my mother into her final rest, rubbing her back one last time the way she likes it as her eyes darken, as her body goes slack. I don’t want my mother to go any other way—that is, alone, without me. But I don’t know if I want my loved ones to watch me die. After death, all muscles in the body immediately relax, meaning that most people release stool and urine and other fluids in those first dead minutes. I want to be dignified in death, as dignified as I can be. I don’t want to expose my loved ones to the smell of me, the version of me that is an ecosystem and not a soul.
And yet I think about being hugged by my dad, ear pressed against his pulse, and the feeling of being anchored to something. And I think, what sweeter way to spend the last moments before floating off into the unknown than to be tethered so sweetly to the earth, to flesh, to the people you love?
All this may very well seem incredibly morbid. But when I told my friend I wanted to die in some far October, I was thinking of October where I grew up—in a valley between gentle Appalachian foothills, the sky cloudless and cornflower blue, the forest ochre and scarlet and gold. Wind cards gently through the leaves, but beneath, nearer the forest floor, the air is still. Once brilliant leaves are faded now, flimsy with moisture as the delicate footsteps of deer press them into cool, damp earth. Somewhere, a Cinnabar fox darts between bare blackberry bushes. A rabbit presses into the crook of a tree root, its nose trembling. Dead leaves rustle as a blue-tinged snake slides between narrow slats of warm sunlight. Overhead, branches sway beneath the weight of a sienna-coated squirrel. There is a hopefulness in the way autumn trails into a crossroads of time and season.
I see nothing morbid in this.
Olivia Flynn is studying English at Brigham Young University with a minor in Spanish. She loves finding new music, getting tacos with friends, and making as many excuses as possible to be outside.
Header image by Noémie L. Côté, Inscape Fall 2025
