Ten Ways of Thinking About the Body

Sam Meekings

1. My brother’s death as a cracked egg

Your body is a reminder. A history of trauma, a language written in scars, a map of everything you have endured. But I don’t need a reminder that he’s not here, that his body is gone, his ashes scattered. I feel it in every bone.

Another way to look at it:

Crack an egg. Out slops the albumen, slick as snot, with the sun-bright yolk jiggling on top. Shards of speckled shell litter the tabletop. And the world lets you stay stunned, for a second or two, and then tells you: put it back together again. Come on, come on. You’re offered every tool you might need: soldering iron, superglue, screwdriver, needle and thread, microscope, grips, and pliers. But you can’t scoop up the gooey white without it slithering between your fingers, and there’s no hope in hell of getting it all back into the broken shell. But the world says: get on with it. 

2. My brother’s death as an argument

As teenagers we would constantly pass comment on each other: I would call him ginger and scrawny, he would call me fat and greasy. I would call his friends “chavs” and he would call mine “gay.” I would call him “stupid” and he would call me  “weak.” In short, we taunted each other without mercy or respite. We did it all so that we could briefly lord it over the other, taking infinite pleasure in those few seconds of put-downs until one of us would reach breaking point and lash out. He knew exactly what I hated about myself, all the little secrets I tried so best to hide, all the things in my heart and personality and appearance and social life I was ashamed of and wished I could change. And I knew the same about him.

We seemed to spend half our time in one another’s minds.

And I am surprised to find that, despite the years, something of all this still burns within me. The love I feel for him is held in perfect balance against the hatred I nurture. Yes, I hate him, with a hatred that throbs like a raw wound. I hate him because he is gone, because this is bloody typical of him. It is just the kind of thoughtless, selfish, and reckless thing only he would do: to piss off and leave us all to clean up the mess he has left behind. I can feel that anger and hatred throb in my head and grind in my teeth, in my tightening jaw and clenching fists, until I have to splash icy cold water onto my face to calm myself down.

3. My brother’s death as a budget

Everything has a price. Here are the costs of saying goodbye to my brother: flowers, £168 (lilies with bobbing heads, carnations, dark chrysanthemums); crematorium fee, £1100; doctor’s fee for cremation certificate, £164; celebrant’s fee for officiating the service, £150; funeral director’s fee, £2530 (preparation and transportation of the body; hearse; light oak veneer coffin, and four strong pallbearers in black to help us carry it); a scattering urn made from recycled paper, £85; wine and spirits for the wake, £400. Adjust for inflation.

4. My brother’s death as black leather

For his tenth birthday, Luke begged for a black leather jacket. Every day for a month he pleaded with my parents to buy him one. Every mealtime, without fail, the conversation would be turned to the leather jacket. Think how good I’ll look in it. Think how impressed everyone who sees me will be. I’ll clean my room every day, and never tease anyone again. Pause. Silence. Then: If you don’t get me one, I’ll wait until everyone’s asleep and then throw ice-cold water on the lot of you! In the end, Mum and Dad had no choice but to give in. The one he chose was a tough, hardy biker jacket, black as octopus ink, and with an oil-slick sheen and a musky animal smell.

Whenever I catch the scent of new leather these days, I see him prancing up and down the living room, flexing and snarling as though it had made him suddenly more animal than man. He wore it all the time, and it became difficult to take him anywhere since he couldn’t pass a mirror without stopping in his tracks to admire himself, either nodding his head approvingly or else raising an imaginary gun towards the assailant he saw in the reflection, the enemy who might or might not have been just a figment of his imagination.

5. My brother’s death as an equation

I sat at my desk and attempted to total up my brother’s allotted time. I estimated that his life amounted to only 8,923 days. Of these I could account for perhaps two or three hundred at best, though admittedly most of these are woefully incomplete and full of holes. I tried to add to this deranged arithmetic the new experiences he never got a chance to try, the places he never visited, the hours wasted on sleep, the lost opportunities, and even the percentage of his life the two of us spent fighting, arguing, or simply ignoring each other. Soon I was standing at the edge of an arithmetical abyss, with nothing below but an infinity of lunatic calculations. Life and death and numbers, numbers, numbers, and nothing adds up.

6. My brother’s death as a pose

Machismo is a role people play, and he played it better than most. The strut and the grizzly poses. The weight training and the bulging suits he wore as a bouncer. The leather jacket and the disdain for anything poncy (like writing books). He had two girlfriends throughout his life–and by a strange accident of chance and caprice, both had the same name.

Becca and Becky. And in the months after the funeral, I so desperately wanted to ask them: in those last years of frantic bodybuilding, how much of that boasting and bravado was a mask? How often did he let his guard slip and let his feelings out? Did he know he didn’t have to put on an act all the time? Or was it the case that the mask became indistinguishable from his skin? But of course, I could never find a way to ask a question like that.

7. My brother’s death as CDs

Up in his bedroom, teenage Luke would often play his favourite songs so loudly that he made the floor shudder. Though he usually stuck with one of the latest West Coast hip hop releases, his taste ranged from reggae through to metal, the only common theme being that the songs he played at maximum volume had to be either raging vehemently against the world or else telling everyone in it to go to hell.

Extra points were awarded for the number of expletives a song contained. His music came pounding out while he bench-pressed in the small corner of his bedroom that had been converted into a mini-gym, or practised throwing darts with such violence that he often found it impossible to pull them out from where they had stuck deep in the dartboard or surrounding wall. None of this would have mattered that much, were it not for the fact that once he found a tune he liked he would play it on repeat, listening to the same track again and again, sometimes for hours. When this happened, the rest of us would have to resort to earplugs or rival music to prevent ourselves from being driven mad. 

Just as we found his habit of playing the same few songs again and again to be a form of torture, so Luke would often grow enraged when he heard any melody that was placid or calm, as if he could not quite fathom why anyone would listen to music to relax rather than to rouse or stir them. Among the CDs of his that I come across after the funeral are The Last Meal, Fuck It, Lucky Star, Deeper Shades of Euphoria, Back to the Old Skool, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, Confessions, Born Again, Death Row Greatest Hits, Rhythm & Gangsta, Shock Value, The Big Dawg, and Execute. Anything with a bucketload of attitude and swagger.

As I searched through his bags and boxes, these titles reminded me that his idea of a great song was one that had a relentless fist-thumping beat, wall-shaking bass, and lyrics that were either brag or slam. I cannot confirm this impression, though, since I had no intention of listening to any of them. Indeed, the first batch I found filled me with such anger that I decided to smash them to smithereens.

At first, I tried to snap a few between my hands, but it proved almost impossible. Next, I stamped on a handful as hard as I could, but CDs turn out to be remarkably resilient, and so I had to take a rolling pin from the kitchen to break them into pieces. It was slow and methodical work, and by the end I felt ridiculous, not least because I had to find the dustpan and brush to sweep away the destruction before my parents saw it.

Once again, I felt like Luke had deliberately tried to make me look stupid.

8. My brother’s death as a taboo

Sometimes I wake up wanting to scream at the top of my lungs: My brother died. MY LITTLE BROTHER IS DEAD. I’m not interested in trading euphemisms or shrouding the worst of it in silence, and the last thing I want is to turn away from the heart-mangling truth of it. Give me a chance and I’ll holler it from the rooftops so the whole wide world below knows. My brother died, and I don’t know what to do.

Shame is something we are taught. The body betrays us. We shit, we sneeze, we burp, we hock and spit, we piss, we bleed. Copiously, endlessly, exhaustingly. But that’s nothing. Worse still, we cry. We leak salty water. And that’s far more shameful. Better to hold it in, and let your pain scald your insides. I want to scream a blood-curdling, ear-splitting scream. But I’m all screamed out by now. So instead I get up. Sling my feet into my slippers. Go and fill up the kettle. 

9. My brother’s death as a fluke of biology

At school Luke turned nonchalance into an art form and made it clear that he couldn’t care less about books or learning or any of that nerd stuff. But once out in the world he threw himself into life: working at construction sites in the morning, then hitting the gym to build muscle and size straight after, then to town to work as a bouncer some evenings and working odd jobs all weekend to save up for his own place. He had too many plans and ambitions to keep still. Luke was so certain that he was gonna be successful–a champion bodybuilder, a self-made millionaire–that he’d already started bragging about his achievements long before he’d made them. He was going to make it.

And he almost did it. But for the quirks of his DNA that made him prone to cardiomyopathy, that hidden defect that made his heart swell and thicken and stretch and that none of us knew about until it was much too late. He didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that no matter how hard he schemed and worked, his whole trajectory was already mapped out for him, set in motion by nothing more than a few random mutations of his genes.

10. My brother’s death as a vessel

I’ve heard it so many times: that the body is really just a bottle holding the bubbling essence of who you really are. And even if the bottle gets smashed or shattered, the soul swimming inside cannot be harmed. I kept picturing my brother lying in the hospital mortuary, his eyes closed and his skin cold, and I had to tell myself again and again: that isn’t him, that isn’t him, that isn’t him. The real Luke is already far away. But the problem is, I know exactly what he’d say: you don’t seriously believe that steaming pile of bullshit, do you? Pull the other one! I can hear his laugh echoing around the dusty corners of my skull. He had little time for sentiment, for grand philosophies or the beliefs of  “bible-bashers,” as he called them.

So, instead, I cling to the idea that the soul isn’t something spilling out from the broken bottle and wafting up into the clouds. Maybe in fact the soul is the part of ourselves we give to the world. The part that does not belong to you, that you cannot take with you when you go. And so I see my brother in every room I enter, in every object I hold close, and in every person whose life he touched. His soul is the part of him that lives on in me.

Sam Meekings is a British novelist and poet. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds, The Book of Crows, and The Afterlives of Doctor Gachet. His writing has been included in Best American Essays and acclaimed in The New York Times. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. He balances his time between teaching, raising two kids as a single father, and drinking copious cups of tea. His website is www.sammeekings.com and he can be found @SMeekings on X.