Death is different for island folk.
It’s an old saying, if not a truthful one. There are islands enough for carnivores. On Kodiak they stake you out for bears, on Komodo you’re left for dragons. Not everywhere is barren of hunting teeth. In most places they’ve come back, feed them up so carefully as we do.
But there are some islands where they never were. Islands of birds and bats, and the only big carnivores are marine, their fish-bellies white around the coast, their easy length swum up along estuaries and into rivers. The great hinged jaw of leopard seals, the smooth sleek lines of blackfish.
Apex predators, all of them.
That our bodies float face down until sheared apart instead of lying with our faces to the sun, our bellies split open, well. Death is different for island folk, and people who spend their lives in scent and sight of the sea make their plans accordingly.
It’s such a careful, chancy thing. Such a wistful thing, the thought of afterlife and salt, for the sea can’t take us all, and we have to fight for a place.
There are people who don’t desire it. Who think themselves more than meat and want a cemetery death, the way old generations went out, using up land cleared of trees and filling the soil with formaldehyde, the remnant chemicals of embalming, as if what we did with pesticides and microplastics wasn’t enough. We kept killing even after we died, our bodies a reminder of the apocalypse we’d brought.
There’s no waste like that now, not even for all the dead who want to go back.
Apex predators die the same as other beasts. They can feed the same as others, too.
A chancy thing, a careful thing. We want to see them back, those populations we broke down. Death and climate, death and habitat loss, death and poison all around, and by the end the only species relied upon to swarm was us. Well, there were insects. Bacteria, too, all the small creatures. The herbivores hung on the longest, but when we think of challenge, of the ones that stalk through imagination and make mirrors of our acts it’s the carnivores we think of, the fearful symmetry of our other selves.
They were so very hard to feed.
But there were so many of us, and so few of them. A simple equation, an obvious solution. Something had to be done with us. And cemeteries were wasted land that was better off reclaimed, crematoria were air pollution and wasted fuel.
People donate their bodies all the time, or used to. Those bodies went to science once, spread out and skinned by medical students, left fallow in a field for monitored decomposition. It was being eaten by worms then, by blowflies and all the other insects and for cause.
Better the body goes to feeding something with a bit more brilliance to it, a bit more beauty.
But it takes so much care. As much meat as we are, as much mechanism of flesh, there’s so many of us. It’s one thing to support the food web, another to unbalance it entirely. No-one wants to feed themselves to rats, to encourage a population explosion as destructive as our own. We’ve only begun to clear the land of what we brought.
But death is different for island folk, and when we let the dead slide into waters off Stewart Island, naked and empty of poison, fed to fish the size of funeral boats, we give them time to recover. Not just the fish, the but seals they would have eaten if our flesh wasn’t offered up as ransom.
The seal colonies are recovering now as well. For a little while at least their predators have easier food, if not so fat. In other places there are antelopes again, herds of them building up because our pride has given way to another, because our bodies atone in death for what our brains have done. The vultures, the eagles, all the loveliness we pushed to extinction now bury their beaks in our entrails and it is good.
We weaned ourselves from the ecosystem once, or said we did. But death is different for island folk, and we do not go into it entire, or alone.