Death has a smell, a sickly pungence that clings to the living around it, the kind of lingering odor that hours later makes your dog sniff your clothing with concern.

After watching my mother’s last percolating breath, her final exhale, I recognized the scent of decay that coated me like dust particles. I knew that smell. It was buried deep inside of me; had been since a day or two after I was born, when the girl I was supposed to be died along with her name.

The smell of my adoptive mother’s death evoked my own death four decades earlier. Which death made me curl into a ball and howl, I wonder? Grief complicated by all that could’ve been, all that wasn’t.

I mask my own whiff of decomposition with frequent showers, lemon verbena scented body creams. And most days I remain unassaulted by the unwelcome fragrance encoded in my cells. I am nose blind to it. Instead, I inhale the bitter aroma of brewing coffee, the wafting florals of my daughter’s scented candles,  the overpowering stench of baseball cleats. And when I summon memories of my mother, I can smell her Estée Lauder body lotion, her chemically permed curls, the warm chocolate of cooling brownies.

But in quiet moments my mind drifts unbidden to that first mother loss, that first self loss, and death’s cloying scent escapes from my pores. Do other people notice? Can they smell it? This sense that my whole being is cloaked in death, a taint impossible to slough off no matter how long the shower, how hot the water.

When the odor of decay and the mourning it brings with it wash over me, I wish I could bargain away my sense of smell. Trade the aroma of a thousand sweet honeysuckle bushes in return for never again having to smell that bittersweet bouquet of little rotting me.