When I was a boy, I found myself captivated by the idea of a whale fall. I could tilt my head up and close my eyes anywhere I was, and call to mind that serene vastness of the ocean above me, carrying down the end of a venerable life. The corpse drifts on the currents that it called home its entire life, passing between shafts of light as they penetrate into the deep blue. Did the whale understand what was to come? Did it spend its final moments gorging itself, fattening the body that waited to become the seat of a frenzied banquet?
In my mind’s eye, time turns back to the end of the whale’s life. Colossal muscles are beginning to fail, but it pushes itself against the force of its screaming body, out towards the deep. Out towards the wall-less sanctuary of the open ocean. Water seethes as the lifegiver empties its lungs, answering the benthic beckoning. Life fades away, given freely, bestowed on the creatures that lurk below.
I am underneath the whale once more. It sinks unmolested, having departed those waters fraught with circling scavengers before succumbing to death’s embrace. I imagine myself stretching my arms out to meet its body, to welcome it into the midst of grateful life all over the sea floor. So many creatures that could not comprehend the light of day will come as close as
they can to the upper world through a taste of the whale’s flesh, through the breakdown of its bones. A microcosm thrives on what the whale generously offers to the ocean floor.
What would it mean for these creatures to give thanks?
So many little mouths that know nothing but the natural order. So many mouths that hunger without knowing satisfaction, that take without understanding gratitude. They are what they are; the whale would not begrudge them their fill. In each of them a part of the whale will live on, and that is enough. As the years pass and the deep currents caress alabaster bones, that body becomes a monument to life as it persists through death.
By the time the world would think of me as a man, I thought less about the ocean, but just as much about drowning. The crushing weight of those aeons became strange, and death began to feel more like something dead. When my father passed away, they put his body in the ground, and I had nothing to take from it. The silt just pooled around me at the bottom of the world. I waited to indulge my little mouth, but no gift of life drifted down. There was no secret left to be uncovered; all that he had had, he gave to me before the darkness called him back. Why then, did I feel so deeply that I needed more?
I never learned about this void. All I ever saw was the life that would come next; life that rushed in to fill the turbulent vacuum abhorred by nature’s cycle. I lingered in the void and the void lingered in me. I couldn’t wrap my arms around emptiness but I could swim up through it, up towards the piercing rays of sunlight that had failed to illuminate a body of life. So I swam.
Now that I think of myself as a man, I know that I was the life left behind. That my father ate up the world around him to make the best out of it for me, and that the solemn smile I see staring back at me in all these pictures would always tell me that I was the gift he proudly gave. My body is buoyant with the giddiness of that knowledge, though at times the responsibility keeps me feeling as though I’m just treading water.
I gorge myself on everything that life has to offer. The rawness of it all, laughter and sorrow, love and loss, flows around and into me. There is trepidation on the cusp of a legacy’s fulfillment, but the scenes that come to me when I close my eyes now offer endless reassurance.
The little mouths look up to me, my body robed in sunlight and ready to be carried into the darkness. I see their outstretched arms and feel their eager gaze, surging forward in anticipation for what I have to give back. I feel myself drifting to the bottom in comfort, ready to satisfy their hunger. Ready to become another monument to life.