The smell of dead things sticks in your lungs like thick smoke. It is disturbingly recognizable; you know it instantly, and it stays with you. This is something I did not know until last summer.
It was a typical shrub-steppe morning: I was sticking pin flags along a creek bed, unshielded from the wide-open sagebrush sky. My three coworkers and I were surveying riparian vegetation in the expansive rangeland of Randolph, Utah. The mystery of the arid desert landscape had by now lost its luster under the crackly heat of late July, any lingering charm swallowed by the tedious rhythm of dusty overalls and eroded gravel and sunbleached topsoil, sunscreen and fruit leather and mosquitoes.
Field data collection can have a hypnotic feel. You set a flag, you measure a plant, you call out a plant type, you record a plant height. Again and again and again until eventually, places and hours and words blur together into one big circle. But this morning, as I shifted up the creekside, the usual mental haze was breached by an odd smell that intensified the further upstream I stepped. My thoughts were still a little watery as I started to mention the weird smell to my coworkers. But as I took another step, everything jolted; between the rushes and asters, I caught a glimpse of exposed bone and muscle. My half-formed words dissolved into the now-overbearing stench of something too unsettled to mention. “There’s a dead thing,” is all I said.
The dead thing’s head coiled all the way back until it closed with the spine in a disemboweled circle. Its legs sprawled and warped like it had clawed and scrambled the last breath from its lungs. A ragged hole in its side bared half its ribcage to the unforgiving summer sun. Knots of fur tangled with its broken-grass grave as it bled into the creek. And it radiated a river of the suffocating smell of the dead.
I stared at it for a shocked moment before the overwhelming fact of its demise faded, revealing the creature underneath. It must have once been a tiny fawn, barely the size of a house cat. It hung from the other side of the creek, hooves almost skimming the water, only a foot or two away from me.
I backed up. I coughed, almost gagging. I covered my mouth and nose with my shirt. The dead fawn saturated the heavy air. Smothering. I held my breath and retreated further. Five, ten, fifteen feet away and the immediate smell faded, but I couldn’t shake its trace, as if it had hooked itself into my airways. My coworkers inched closer to inspect the fawn with mildly cautious interest. I kept my distance, with a clenched jaw and guarded lungs.
We must have paused our flag-setting for only a minute or two; fieldwork stops for no creature, dead or alive. The sun rose higher, and we left the fawn behind, but I inhaled warily the rest of the day, as if every shift of the air might carry a trace of that terrible smell.
The primary building blocks of life are the organic elements carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. These elements combine to form larger molecules: proteins, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids, which in turn fold themselves into cells, tissues, and organs. While an animal lives, it eats and drinks and respirates, keeping its body in a metabolic balance. But when an animal dies, this molecular maintenance ceases, and bacteria start to break the bonds that held the creature together. Bacterial breakdown of animal proteins, particularly the amino acid lysine, releases the foul-smelling compounds cadaverine and putrescine, which combine to create the telltale stench of death.
Humans are built to respond to these odors with disgust – dead things and infections are vectors for disease, so evolutionary forces ingrained in us a revulsion towards them. Recent research suggests that both conscious and subconscious exposure to putrescine triggers heightened alertness and fight-or-flight responses in humans. So it makes sense that our response to this smell is physically and emotionally stark. To experience this inherent repulsion towards death is to understand the strength of the will to live – we fight to survive because we otherwise would have died long ago. We were born resilient.
It’s been several months now, but that immediately familiar olfactory mix of decomposition and dread almost haunts me. Sometimes I’ll be in a parking lot, at the store, in a classroom, and the memory of it somehow pushes its way into the tangible. It disguises itself in the sunbaked weeds of an empty lot and the chemical burn of wet paint. I know it’s just a phantom of itself but it lurks nonetheless, reappearing by surprise to remind me that things die palpably.
I am fortunate that, at this point in my life, most of my experiences with death have been relatively tame. I’ve attended less than a handful of funerals. When I went to my paternal grandfather’s viewing in middle school, I remember appraising his sleeping wax face with some degree of confusion. Seeing him unliving invoked no immediate emotional response – it took continuous concentration to well up any tears, as if my brain just couldn’t fully realize that living things sometimes stop living.
My maternal grandfather died just last summer. I received the news over text while I was sitting cross-legged in the park, eating yogurt out of a plastic container with the threat of rain stirring overhead. I blinked at the muted gray of the skyline, peculiarly unshaken. By the time I drove home for his funeral, his ashes were already tucked away into some untold corner of my grandma’s apartment. To me, his death was a subdued disappearance: breathing yesterday, ashes today, blankness in between.
There’s some sort of fundamental disconnect there, like death is a reef shark or a giant Pacific octopus and I’m wide-eyed staring at it through a thick pane of glass at the aquarium. It’s something so foreign and incomprehensible, but the separation between us renders it incorporeal. It almost feels fake.
But my encounter with the dead fawn was visceral. There was no pane of glass to shield me from it, no mortician to sand away its sharp edges. The physical manifestation of this creature’s lack of life invaded my nose and throat. It forced recognition.
We live with the very real possibility of demise every day of our lives. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we are mortal, especially in places where death is sterilized, polished, and glassy, the realm of hospitals and embalmers and droning machinery, always a step removed. But sometimes it’s impossible to forget, and somehow we have to deal with the remembering of it. I could believe that some semblance of my consciousness will persevere into eternity. I could believe that everything is a circle, that time means nothing, that all we have and all we need is the here and now. I could believe that death is as natural as birth; we rise from the dust, to dust we return, glory hallelujah. But all the euphemisms in the world cannot convince me that it’s okay to die.
The cycle of life is grotesque. It is the exposed ribcage of a decomposing fawn unraveling into a creek. It is a snapped neck, a bleeding side. My bones might someday be cleanly packaged in a casket or burned into powdery dust, but they will be bones nonetheless, and they will be me no more. Bones may tell a story, but they are devoid of identity. Bones were living things, but now they are just calcium phosphate outlines of the what-was. And that terrifies me.
The thought of my own mortality weighs on me like thick smoke, pervasive and haunting. I feel it without warning in the parking lot, at the store, in the classroom. It disguises itself in the corners of the evening and the pillars of the afternoon, an abstraction made tangible. It’s not just a phantom but a tactile fear, a lurking reality, undefined but certain: I will die palpably.
Mercy Smith (she/her) is a student of watershed sciences at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. A lifelong Utahn, she has spent countless hours exploring the state's lakes, mountains, and suburban landscapes. Her passions include animals, rivers, and environmental literature, with a particular interest in the many intersections between human society and the natural world.