The following is a paper I recently submitted for my Death and Dying class. The topic was "write about a time when you came face to face with death." This is what i wrote:
As a child, my parents did a pretty good job sheltering me from the concept of death. In my house, great grandma didn’t “die”—she “went to Heaven.” My pet cat wasn’t “dead”—he “ran away to live with little boys who went to bed on time.” Growing up, I never went to a wake – never went to a funeral. Death just wasn’t something we talked about. I wasn’t a stupid kid, not especially stupid anyway. I knew of death, but it wasn’t until my 7th grade biology class that I was forced to stare it face to froggy face.
I remember walking into class that morning with a mixture of apprehension and morbid excitement riding in my belly. We had been preparing for it for weeks, and here it was – the day when boys become men and girls become, well, squeamish girls. It was frog dissection day, and frankly, I was stoked.
The smell of formaldehyde stung my nostrils as I sat down in my chair. On top of the teacher’s desk was what from a distance looked to be a pickle jar, and in many ways I guess you could say it was. The bell rang, and my teacher rushed in like a small child on Christmas. I had never seen her so excited. She walked over to the pickle jar, popped the lid, and said, “Come get ’em while they’re hot!” No one laughed.
We all picked up the silver trays in front of us, and in cafeteria fashion, we each waited in line for our helping of frog. As I got up to the table, my teacher looked at me with devilish excitement.
“Bon appétit,” she said.
“Gross,” I said.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at it as I walked back to my table. Afraid making eye contact would bring it back to life, I decided to wait until I was with my lab partner to glance down – that way there would at least be two of us to subdue the potential zombie frog.
I put it down in front of my partner, and she recoiled in horror. “That’s all you!” she said. Apparently she didn’t share my teacher’s enthusiasm.
So it was just me and froggy. Mano y frogo. I gathered up the courage to look at it…at her. She laid on my cold tray in a seemingly unfroglike position – flat on her back and legs spread out. Her arms were up in the air with her fingers wide apart, as if she had died in the middle of showing everyone her jazz hands. Her belly lay motionless. It was easy to imagine life once breathing through her, moving the now still flesh slowly up and down. I was mesmerized.
For the first time I looked at the face of death: this frog had once been alive. She had little frog friends and did little frog things. She played and ate and croaked. She had parents, and siblings, and maybe even children. But now she was dead, lying in my tray with her cold dead eyes staring at the people sitting in front of me. The smell of formaldehyde brought tears to my eyes.
My teacher was now floating around the class room. “You need to pin the limbs down in your tray. This will keep them from jumping around while you’re cuttin’ into ’em.” Again, no one laughed.
My frog was stiff as a board and hard as a rock. I picked up one of the long pins sitting next to my tray, and timidly inserted it into her left jazz hand – being extra careful to touch as less frog as possible. I took another, and tried to pin down her right. As the pin pierced her right hand, her left popped up, just like a seesaw. I secured her right, and then pushed down her left again. Now the right came unpinned. My partner laughed at me. Pushing down the right, the left came back up. This went on, back and forth, for quite some time. I felt like I was middle of a Three Stooges bit. My partner laughed. “It’s like watching a clown trying to figure out a fitted-bed sheet.”
My teacher walked by and saw the difficultly I was having. “Oh Pumpkin,” she said as she snatched up my frog with her bare hand, “You have to put some muscle into it.” And with that, she snapped every bone of my frog’s body in two. It sounded like kindling breaking. She tossed it back onto my tray and easily placed the pins into her fragmented body.
I looked the frog, and then at my teacher, with horror. “You…you…you broke her!” I said.
“It’s called rigor mortis, Pumpkin. The same thing will happen to you when you die.”
The same thing will happen to me when I die? I continued along with the dissection, but these words stuck with me.
The same thing will happen to me when I die?
After I opened up the body cavity, we discovered our frog was in fact, a she, and filled to the brim with eggs. I began to scrape them out, as instructed. Potential-frog-babies-that-would-never-be piled up in my tray. My partner screamed as one little potential-frog-baby squirted into her eye. I hardly noticed though.
The same thing will happen to me when I die?
The kids in front of me were making their hollowed out frog dance and sing. “Look everyone, it’s the WB frog! Hello my baby, hello my honey…”
But I wasn’t paying attention. Again, I thought, the same thing will happen to me when I die? Here, before me, was this little frog – just a regular frog mind you, not a special frog. She probably didn’t do anything too exciting with her life. She probably spent most of her time hopping from lily pad to lily pad, ate a fly or two. She was just a lame-o frog, and now she was dead. She was dead/gone/not coming back, and the same thing is going to happen to me. ME! Me, who was infinitely cooler than this stupid frog. Me who had learned how to read and write, who knew every capital of every state, who could stand on my hands in the pool, and knew exactly where to punch my brother to make him throw up. ME! I was going to end up just as dead, just as cold, and just as stiff and smelly as this frog.
It was a powerful realization. Never before this had I given much thought to death. It was at this moment I realized that death was not only inevitable, but natural. I was put on this earth with only one requirement of me – to die. It was a powerful moment, and frankly, it sucked. And here’s to the frog that brought it to me.
At least she’s dead.
