A few notes from the tenants’ body

“A tenant lived with the corpse of his former lodger for 10 years”
“Alan Derrick discovered his lodger Dennis Pring dead on his sofa in 1998 and rather than report it decided to cover the body with cushions and two armchairs”
“The decomposing body was not found”
“There came a point, I would say at the end of April 1998 or June 1998, when Mr Pring laid down on the sofa and did not get up again”
“The bath tub was full of human excrement”
“A healthier dose of common sense might have stopped Mr Pring’s death lying undiscovered”

[“Tenant who feared eviction kept lodger’s body in house for 10 years” Guardian, Tuesday 20th April, Article by Steven Morris]


It seems we are all faced with the trouble of what to do with the body.

From digesting it, to freezing it (back into the maternal crypt with Elisa Marder), to covering it with pillows and hoping somewhat the body won’t be found, or that we won’t have to explain how it ended up there. The body always seems to end up problematic. It always needs to be negotiated. It’s not just a case of how to deal with death, of mourning, or absence, but also an act of creating that absence in the disposal of the flesh. And how to perhaps articulate the death, or explain it. Why you ended up with your dead babies in the freezer or why it seemed appropriate to lick the ashes of your husband?


In the end we are all still left with what to do with the body.

My dealings with death or what to do with the body?

A few weeks ago, I was driving my normal route home, down a normal road, when I encountered a dead bird. The bird had only just been hit, it’s body only (just) cut lightly at the neck, it had a minimal of blood, and otherwise it seemed completely intact. It was warm to the touch but dead. She seemed so whole and therefore alive, that I thought it would be a great disrespect to leave her there, alone and dead. So that night I decided, or at least it came to be, to hold a vigil. I moved the bird from the boot of my car, and placed it solemnly in my house, and laid her on my bedroom floor. I lay that night very aware of her presence. We shared a space while I inhaled the stale smell of death and the inevitability that perhaps I may lay pressed on the middle of someone’s floor, rotting.

After the third night. I was faced with the conundrum. What to do with the body? As it so happened some friends were coming to stay and therefore I ended up hiding her in a cupboard and hoping she wasn’t discovered.

She wasn’t, and while she was hidden I was marked with this deep sense of guilt. This conscious awareness of the body, burning at the back of my mind. I knew she was there, and no one else did.

I wrote, “It is still there. It seems vastly inappropriate to burry her. My one true love, I guess, after the nights we shared. Two bodies, in opposition, lying gently in a room. So I am stuck. Unable to consume, burry or in any other way destroy my bird. I face the ethical decision of whether to place her back on the same road where I found her… lead her, after my delay, back to that inevitable fate? Or she can sit where she is, cold and gently rotting, her innards spilling into some soup.

“Lovely, she says to me, thank you for keeping me, thank you for saving me… but you were too late, or perhaps too early. Why did you capture me?” She utters. Her ghost lingers in the bedroom, in my bed. I should have kissed you goodnight while you were still warm. “

I wondered briefly, about pulling her feathers. Plucking her body, taking her most beautiful parts, and preserving them.. But I prefer her whole. It seems a disseet to separate her now, when that was the very thing I was fighting against. “What permitted me to gather her, what permitted me to take, to intervene in the natural process, the one that was about to gather her limbs? What right did I even have to perform her?” (That was a mistake, in my own writing. but it seems to fit. I began to animate the dead bird, I never knew. Possessing her, stealing my idea of her identity. Never really letting her be)

I said, “I acted like a comrade. Watching over her passing”

In the end, I remained motionless. I left her rotting, till the smell consumed the whole house, and she was eventually discovered. Then, I did not burry her, or return her, or do any of the things I had contemplated. In the end, I placed her in a black plastic bag, and left her for the rubbish.

I am still stuck in the same untold ethical situation that I was before. Only my physical bird has vanished. The thing that drew me to her was her wholeness, and I was determined not to let her be separated. The soil would eventually dissolve her. The road would allow her to be smooched, and then consumed with maggots and bacteria. The bag seemed to contain in some way the sense of her, but disregard the gravity of the body that I had collected.

In the end I am still faced with the same dilemma: what to do with the body?