Is God a Bad Word?

A rooftop bearing a cross, with three crows sitting against a gray sky background.

By. Samantha Morgan

I remember the smells of the funeral home fondly.

They were thick and hung heavy in the stale air. If death has a smell, it’s fresh flowers and stillness.

I didn’t spend much of my time in a funeral home as a girl, but even a small amount isn’t something you easily forget. I imagine my parents dropped me off for my grandmother to babysit me, but I don’t know for sure. She worked there as a florist for many years. I’d like to think she told me to stay close, but I never did. She was preoccupied with her work which she loved, and I was preoccupied with looking at corpses. She was even put in the newspaper for her flower arrangements. There is a painting of it on her wall.

I hope I get it when she dies.  

I have glimpses of corpses that float in my mind.

But they’re mostly of people I don’t know. People I’ll never know. There is of course your face, Nichole. I remember your dead body. So odd seeing someone you love, lifeless. Yet, she was just the first of many, and many more yet to come. I remember your mother petting your head while she cried. And I remember thinking, this is the most real my life has ever felt to me.

Is that what death does?

Remind us we’re real, yet fleeting? Only real for now, for a glimmer in a bottomless void of everything and nothing.

If we didn’t die, I think we’d forget altogether we’re alive.

A dead body has nothing and everything to say.

Quite literally, it can’t speak. Which is nice. The silence when you are with a corpse is deafening. It’s as if you’re waiting for them - whoever they were in that body - to come back to life; gasping, hysterical. But they never do. So you begin to have a conversation with yourself, as the mind loves to do.

Touch it, my mind would say.

I’d hover my finger right over their closed eyes or lips, but I’d never set it down. Something about the dead says, respect me. Perhaps whatever they lacked in their waking lives, their eternal sleep grants them.

One could only hope.

The mind will move along.

It will try to form a narrative of who this person was.

A grandpa. A father. A lover.

Once a long time ago, a boy.

Your mind chimes in:

You’re going to die one day, just like this body did.

Do you think there was a soul in there?

Do you think they can see you now hovering over their dead body?

Then you get the sense you’re doing something wrong. You look around to make sure god isn’t watching.

If you sit with the body long enough, your thoughts will shift away from them, and they will focus back on you, as thoughts do. Your thoughts will ask you who you are.

Who are you?

A girl, I’d say.

A girl who does what?

Not much really. I like to play around, and I like to smell the flowers when I can.

What will you do when you’re dead?

I think I’ll still like to play around and smell the flowers, I say.

As an adult I know that won’t be the case when I die.

I know when I die I won’t be Samantha Morgan anymore. I won’t be human anymore. Not conscious anymore - not as I understand it now. But I’ll be something. Energy. Dirt. Food for something else to feed on. I’ll live on in some way or another, but not as a girl turned woman.

So then, I have to ask myself, what is the point?

What is the point of inventing myself only to be destroyed? Forgotten. Left in a room for dead - for a child to poke at. Maybe there isn’t a point. Maybe there needn’t be a point. Maybe that is the point. It just is the way it is.

Life brings death, and death brings life.

And you can dance while you’re here, or not.

You can dance while you’re here, or not. And I hope you do.

There was an elderly man at the funeral home who taught me about god. I believe he was the first person to teach me about such things. Such quiet, powerful things. I remember walking down the hallway, my hand in his. I don’t actually know who he was, or if he was alive or dead. It’s hard to tell who is who in a funeral home.

He asked me once, Samantha, how do you speak to god? And though I don’t recall any other instances with this man, I somehow knew an answer.

I said, I listen with my heart.

Yes. He said. That’s right.

I stopped talking to god for a long time.

I turned my heart off;

I drank it off.

I drugged it off.

I fucked it off.

I loathed it off.

I numbed it off.

During that period I learned how to bury my heart, much like that of a corpse in the ground, beneath the burden of living. This caused me to one day go in search of it; forgetting I always had it in my chest, still beating, still trying to remind me I am alive. I am a life.

Eventually the beating knocked some of the rubble off, which allowed me the space to find it again. You only need space to find things, that’s all.

One day I could hear it again, my body beating.

I could talk to god again. And I don’t mean god as in the man in the sky, there is no man in the sky, but as in the consciousness in me. God as I understand it lives in my heart. Lives in my cells. Lives in every molecule and every atom that makes up all of existence. God as I understand it doesn’t watch from above, but from my very eyes. God isn’t something to worship, but something to experience. God is just a human word for something as loaded as the entire Universe; the mystery we’re living in. 

The old man in the hallway asked me how to talk to god. As a child I settled for talking.

As a woman I learned how to become god.

Photo of Samantha wearing a black beret and knit tank top. She has tattoos, a nose ring, and chin length hair.

Much of Samantha Morgan’s writing explores the dark nature of us as beings, as well as how we can embody our light to expose it. She is an advocate for living without alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. She believes our secrets will eat us alive, and that living in the light; exposed/glaring/loud/whole is how we defy them. Her life’s mantra (at the moment) is - Dedicated Curiosity.

Instagram/Twitter: @slamantha.morgan