Content warnings

Death. Violence. Bereavement. Family estrangement. Suicide mention. Cannibalism.

The thing about regret was that it curdled. It couldn’t stand up to the harsh salts of traditional methods of preservation, and even a simple vinegar brine would ruin its integrity. Most membalmers opted to soak it in ethanol, but Val was of the opinion that harsh spirits destroyed the nuance of the emotion. Besides that, judging from the ascites and sallow complexion, Mr. Jensen had been an alcoholic. She couldn’t present his daughter with her dad’s final thoughts sloshing around in a jar of Everclear. It wouldn’t be kind.

Regret was without question the emotion no membalmer wanted to see trickling into the basin when they tapped a skull. It was the sickly brown of leaves decomposing into stagnant water, and fragility aside, it smelled foul. The ideal outcome for any preservation, of course, was to provide a living memento of the deceased for their survivors—something to take comfort in after the graveside service was over. Knowing that your loved one had spent their last moments in distress was hardly comforting.

Val couldn’t do anything about the content of the memories, though. All she could do was preserve them, and she was determined to find a way to save this one. Tipping the basin’s contents into a clean specimen jar, she sealed and labeled it with Mr. Jensen’s name and date of death before placing it in the mortuary’s fridge for safekeeping.

There was time. Surely she could think of something.

Fear was the color of lead and clung to itself like ferrofluid, forming little spikes as it pressed against the walls of the glass vial. It was easy to preserve—freeze-dried into a powder, it would keep for many years—although Val wasn’t sure who would want to consume it, knowing what it was. Fear was a common if sad last thought, and perhaps even less comforting to re-experience than regret. Who had ever wanted physical proof that their loved one had died afraid? This memory would likely sit forgotten in its canopic jar, untouched by the deceased’s next of kin, but Val took extra care loading it into the dehydrator anyway. It reached for her as she closed the door, rising up in shimmering points.

Val had tasted fear in her apprenticeship days. Medical memories: final thoughts extracted from those who had donated their bodies to science, used for training purposes. Her mentor had felt strongly that they needed to understand why they used particular methods of membalming rather than just how to perform them, and to that end had made all of them sample it raw. The drop of cadaver fear had clung to her fingertip like a burr, writhing anxiously. It pricked her tongue when she tasted it—

—but that pain was instantly lost, superseded by the leaden weight crushing in on her chest. A sea of fluorescents undulated above, rapidly being consumed by the whirling darkness encroaching from the edges of her vision. She tried to draw breath, but her lungs wouldn’t move. There was shouting somewhere nearby, but no one was doing anything—no one was helping her. Oh G-d, no one was helping—

Val had come back to herself on hands and knees in the anatomy lab, retching and gasping for air along with the rest of her cohort. The sample of preserved fear, reconstituted in a small quantity of cranberry juice, had gone down much more easily. It encapsulated the same memory, but as if experienced through a closed door.

Mr. Jensen’s daughter came in that afternoon for her consultation. She resembled her father only in outline, the shape of her face echoing his but its features recalling someone softer and kinder, with a small nose and large brown eyes. She looked tired. Her hair was badly tangled despite being pulled up into a bun—Val suspected she’d slept on it—and she was wearing a stretched-out Michigan State sweatshirt. Val felt a twinge of sympathy as she introduced herself and offered her condolences. She was so young. And, although she’d seen families nearly come to blows over funeral arrangements more than once, she always felt worst for the people who had to handle everything by themselves. This poor girl wouldn’t have come alone if she’d had another option.

Collin was exceedingly kind as he went over the options for services and disposition of the physical remains, walking her through what each would look like and what they would entail. She elected to have her father cremated, eschewing the funeral service entirely. When Collin brought her over to the urn display, she pointed to the least expensive option without so much as glancing at the others.

“I know this is presumptuous,” he said gently, “but if cost is a concern, we do partner with an organization who will cover a simple service and a portion of the urn in cases like these. I can give you their card if you like.”

Mr. Jensen’s daughter waved him off. “I appreciate the offer, but it’s not that. To tell you the truth, he probably did want a big funeral and a fancy casket. But so did Mom, and he put her in the cheapest urn they had. If that was good enough for her, then it’s good enough for him. Besides”—she smiled weakly—“I don’t think anyone would show up to his service even if we had one. It’s fine.”

“Ultimately, it’s your decision.”

“What about his memory?” Val prompted as Collin took notes on his clipboard. “Due to the condition of his body, preserving it may be challenging.”

Mr. Jensen’s daughter shrugged. “Do whatever you want with it. I doubt I’m missing much.”

This kind of response wasn’t uncommon. Val had lost count of the number of times a bereaved family member had told her to dump a memory down the sink, only to call the mortuary a few months later to ask if they still had it. They usually did. She made a point of holding on to them until they spoiled, just in case.

She handed the girl her card. “If you change your mind, don’t hesitate to call. We’ll look after it until then.”

Not every memory was salvageable. Bodies with injury to the cranium in particular weren’t good candidates for membalming. Still, Val would try if the family insisted. One of her proudest accomplishments had been extracting a complete memory from a young mother whose skull had been crushed in a motor vehicle accident. She’d lingered on life support for some time before dying, and those liminal weeks between life and death were likely what had made the retrieval possible. The thought flowed out flecked with blood and macerated brain tissue, but by straining it through a series of cheesecloths and coffee filters, Val had at last managed to produce a clean vial of shimmering, pearlescent acceptance. Preserved with citric acid, the memory was suitable for presentation. She felt like she’d worked a miracle.

I don’t know how you did it, but it still felt like her, the woman’s sister had written later. I can’t express how much that meant to us.

Val’s newest arrival, a train track suicide, was not going to be one of those exceptions. Whatever had been going through his head in those final moments was long gone, spilled out between the railroad ties, and that was for the best. That his survivors would never have to experience what he’d felt at the end was a mercy.

She still hadn’t come up with a viable method of preservation for Mr. Jensen’s regret, and Collin’s suggestions had been useless. The chemicals he used for the bodies were too harsh, and poisonous besides. The literature had no suggested alternatives for alcohol.

Stymied, she reached out to a membalming forum online for advice.

Just dump it, one user wrote back. No point in being heroic trying to save a bad memory.

The lit recommends tincture because it’s the only way to keep it stable, said another. I mean, she could drink it raw, but why would you want to?

The rest of the responses echoed this refrain, save one. Why don’t you try cheong? its author suggested. That’s my go-to for regret. It takes a while, but the sugar cuts the bitterness nicely. It keeps longer, too.

They had included instructions for making cheong from memories, which seemed easy enough to follow. Val bought a five-pound bag of sugar at the corner store and spent the afternoon carefully packing Mr. Jensen’s regret into a clean jar with it. It almost looked like maple taffy as it settled into all that glittering white.

The memory would take several weeks to ferment, she informed his daughter over voicemail, but its integrity would be preserved. If she liked, she could pick it up when she came to retrieve his cremains.

Another miracle accomplished.

Anger was volatile and challenging to work with. Once aspirated from the skull, it oxidized rapidly and was liable to explode if left unchecked. The inconvenient thing about membalming was that Val never knew exactly what she was about to pull out. It wasn’t like the memory’s owner could tell her what to expect. More often than not, the thought that trickled into her basin was some variation on sadness or relief—but she’d learned to keep a specimen jar filled with oil nearby whenever she was working on a fresh body just in case. It had saved her more than once in the past, and today it saved her again.

The memory seethed as she poured it into the jar, pressing itself hard against the glass. Topping it off with more oil from the cupboard, she sealed it tightly and held it up to the light.

Like fear, anger was an unpleasant remnant of the deceased. It was also one of the only ones that could not be ingested in unadulterated form, less because it would directly harm the person who consumed it than because of what they might do to themselves or their surroundings while lost in the throes of another person’s rage. Some newer schools of membalming experimented with homeopathic dilutions, but Val was of the opinion that this practice was only a couple of steps removed from charlatanry. At the concentrations they recommended little if any of the original memory remained at all, effectively leaving the family with an expensive bottle of distilled water. And at higher ones, the memory would continue to oxidize over time and eventually cause the vial to explode. Oil infusion was the only stable method of preservation for any variation on anger, and the only one that maintained emotional fidelity. Authenticity was important to Val. It wasn’t her place to sanitize or prettify what she found in an effort to spare the family’s feelings. She could only preserve the thoughts as best she could and trust that they would process their reactions on their own time, in their own way.

Mr. Jensen’s daughter never returned Val’s call, or any of the messages Collin left her. When after several months it became apparent that she had no intention of retrieving his cremains, Collin took the urn home to rest in his china cabinet with the dozen or so others he looked after.

Val kept the regret on a shelf in the back, where it fermented into a thick golden-brown syrup. Mr. Jensen wasn’t the first person whose family hadn’t come back for them. Although she understood that his daughter must have had good reasons for abandoning him—and sympathized, given that her own parents hadn’t been saints—she hoped, as she did for all the others, that one day she would change her mind. In the meantime, she and Collin would care for his remains. It was an easy kindness for them to do.

Not even preserved memories kept indefinitely, though. Time passed, and as it did the jar of regret oxidized to a deep mahogany. As the end of its shelf life approached, Val made one final attempt to reach out to Mr. Jensen’s daughter. Her phone had been disconnected.

Val wasn’t an arbiter of deeds. Just as it wasn’t her place to decide what parts of a memory were worthy of presentation, it wasn’t her place to judge the deceased on their actions in life. Nor did she want to know the details of the wrongs that had been committed. At the end of life, everyone was deserving of compassion and dignity, and there was no dignity in the unceremonious dumping of a memory down the drain.

She took the regret home with her instead, and on a misty morning carried it to her favorite bench by the river and opened it. Inside the jar, little bubbles rose lazily to the surface. It no longer stank of bitterness; time had transformed it into something beautiful.

As the sun began to burn through the mist, she brought it to her lips and let it fill her with its heavy, slow lament.

END

Author's note

A few years ago videos of cremains for sale at Goodwill were all over TikTok, and as an avid thrifter I've also found my share of urns at antique stores. I found myself wondering what prompted folks to donate their loved ones, and that became the spark for this story.

RJ Aurand

RJ Aurand is a southern Appalachian writer, poet, and lover of the bizarre whose work has appeared in The Deadlands, manywor(l)ds, s(c)rawl, and others.