Good Mourning

"I'd like to be a bog person, I reckon"

"You what?" 

"If I die. It would be cool to be a bog person, preserved in mud. Like a mummy, but really English" he says.

We are sitting in bed, feet tangled. Delaying the opening of the bedroom door, delaying the weekend rushing in. 

I've been drifting in and out of the edges of sleep, he has been revealing snippets of stories from his phone which feel like my dreams.

"Are you sure? I’m not sure that's one of the options, normally". It would be hard to make a peaty bog appealing in the brochures, next to the marble headstones and gilt gold handles on glossy black lacquer. 

"No, I suppose you'd have to find a bog yourself and put me in it”

“Like a push?”

He pulls away and slaps a hand to his mouth in mock horror, the other pretending to beat his assailant off. I grab the flailing limb and press it to my mouth in victory.

“I was thinking more lowered, voluntarily. A final act of love"

He laughs, we both laugh. But I want to whisper into his neck that, if he really asked, I would do it. If it were that way round, if there was a way of balancing the scales of love and care then I would. Holding all my affection for him is so heavy, I think it would sink us both into the bog, no lowering required.

My brother’s girlfriend, she is very cool, knows lots of things, said that human ashes are actually toxic. They kill the roses in the crematorium, and that after people are buried and the family has left the staff come around with a big hoover. They suck all the ashes up and replace them with fertiliser. I think of Grandma in the perpetually smiling face of a Henry Hoover. She used to vacuum the step outside her front door. Sometimes she vacuumed the garden path. The journey to her home was famously dust free. I don't think she would like living in a hoover, with the dirt she’d tried to obliterate. 

I thought about what it would mean, for dying to not be part of cycle of death and rebirth but to actually be death and poison and more death. 

I think maybe it's possible to be too cool, to know too many things. 

“Also, if they found me in the bog, they’d put me in the British Museum,” we are sat up now, his breath hot from coffee in my ear.

The thought that I shouldn’t frown, comes after it has already happened.

“Would you want to be on display in the British Museum? Forever? Really?” It seems to me a very stark, cold way to spend an afterlife, in a climate-controlled glass case. It makes me shiver.

“Well I would save a lot of money on entry fees, and you could buy a postcard of me in the giftshop. If you wanted.”

It isn’t a new tradition in that way, we have been doing it for years. We accept that someone is no longer a person but a destination. A site to visit on special occasions. Maybe a postcard would be nice to put on the fridge. Held up with the magnet from that time in Mallorca.

Personally, I had always liked the idea of those tree eggs. I would be curled up, wrapped whole, in a cloth cocoon from which a baby tree would sprout. My body would become a seed for something new. It’s being touted as a new style of burial for the climate-conscious condemned. I like the idea of being revolutionary in death, I am not sure I have managed to blaze many trails in life. But the more I thought, it unsettled me that I would look like any normal tree. No discernible features between me and the oak to my right, the beech to my left. It would be a peaceful existence. I worry people might never find me, that I might be forgotten. There would have to be a map, X marks the spot where she lies. I could ask him to return to me after I'm gone, to carve our initials into my trunk like teenagers, part of my wooden flesh. But tattooing a lover’s name is, famously, a surefire death knell for the relationship. Even in death I think I'm wary of curses, and wary what mum would think. Are tattoos classless on trees as well?

The tree eggs first appeared as glossy adverts on my social media. There were leaf emojis and a pun in the caption. My recommended adverts have been skewing this way for months. First it was loungewear and meal delivery kits, no strings no questions life insurance, then online therapy, and sometimes I think the algorithm knew I was dying before we did. Someone over there in Silicon Valley could sense it through the frantic pace of my thumbs writing and deleting messages, through the step-count-tracked pacing down corridors on an empty stomach. The dating app ads he is now getting feel a little cruel. Why deprive him, and the world, of a mourning period when he would look so good in black. 

When I was fourteen, I convinced a girl in my class that the RIP stood for Rot in Peace, and that rest in peace was something you said to people recovering from illness. It was something to do and at that age I was enjoying testing and pressing the edges of my power.  There had been so much time then, girls holed up in classrooms over wet lunchbreaks and dissolving into liberating silliness. It had taken a while, but it had worked, and she had thanked me. I hope she didn't try to comfort any convalescing relatives in the weeks afterwards. Even if, actually, the new abbreviations I had created were much more accurate for both situations. 

It is the wrong thing to say though, I do understand. There's definitely a right thing to say, and then you select from the menu of right things to do. And then everyone sings from the same hymn sheet of right things to say for a few months. The hymn sheet does not use the word 'rot', and it does not use the phrase 'bog chemistry'. 

The light is coming stronger through the blinds now, casting stripes across the wall and our bodies still submerged in duvet. He entwines my fingers in his as he shows me pictures of the bog people. They exist as matter somewhere between an old leather football and the mahogany carved elephants my Grandad used to have on his mantlepiece. Most of those elephants had one, or no tusks left. But the bog people still had fingernails, and hair, and expressions. 

I look at his hand in mine, it would look very grand in mahogany.  Mine are flecked with freckles; the bones are too prominent. My wood would be gnarled, peppered with knots and depressions. A grain where branches were lost, of the battles within my body, already cleaved and worn.

Sometimes I struggle to make the automatic taps in public bathrooms work and I wonder if I am already a ghost, whether the sensors can detect my wasting and know I am already partially departed. A physical issue with the plumbing?  The possibility is only ever an afterthought.

He seems to notice the tracks my eyes are leaving in my skin, and pulls my hand into a slat of sunlight, where it looks briefly golden, the grain glorious.

He tells me historians think people believed the bogs were liminal spaces. Connecting to other worlds, new worlds. To pass through the bog you might transcend into a new realm. I remember reading somewhere that a teaspoon of soil contained over 50% of the earth’s life. The earth is alive, and it could take us to a bog kingdom. In the sump and mire, we would be forever. An everglade of rich mahogany bodies. The more I imagine myself sinking into the bog the more I feel held. I feel my fear being absorbed, seeping into the earth around me as the soil cradles me and yields its quiet. The last six months have been frenetic fear and maniacal planning. I have poured my worries, finances, desire for legacy, desire for peace into the laps of the living. In this moment I see the earth is ready to accept me, to take me into its arms and preserve me in its hold. I will become an organic sculpture, shaped by my own acceptance of my fate.

Or I might be swallowed and chewed by peat and salt water. As intangible as ashes.

We get dressed and take a train and two buses out to the crematorium in Essex. My Grandma's rose still looks beautiful. Worthy of her front garden. It's hard to argue she didn't have a hand in it. 

Jocelyn is a writer and arts producer based in South London. She has been writing since early school days, culminating in an original musical about the dreaded quarter-life crisis, and a web series co-written with a friend about time travel by the time she was 18. She studied English Literature and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds. Jocelyn has worked in Theatre, Museums and Galleries since, exploring how to tell stories in different, exciting and unusual ways. She is currently working on her first novel.