GMAT Essays (AWA)

Yes, I know this is an odd request, but I wrote this essay without any help or info outside of my own research from loving this topic, so I wrote this basically off the top of head and I am using it as a midterm essay paper, since I have never wrote a essay in my life, I wondered if someone could please rate this and give me and outside perspective to things I may not see or be considering to make it better? Thank you in advance for any help in this!


The Beautiful Sound of Rice Krispies in the Morning

As we live our lives, we are forced to deal with a multitude of uncomfortable things, one of those things being death. The human brain processes death in a variety a ways depending on the person, most being in a mournful state of depression and perpetual sadness. Then there are those who see death as a beautiful, artful display of everything we as humans strive to understand. The process of decay and decomposition, breaking down the former shell we inhabited, the ideal of not only the existence of the soul, but also the exiting of the soul, gracefully floating to a better world, the electrochemical responses of the human body after death, these of the things that very few people see, and even fewer number that appreciate and see the true beauty of it. I am one of those few, one out of 967,940 people in the US who strive to understand the unknown, to understand what most people turn away from.

The curious lives of human cadavers, some willing and some unwillingly have been involved in some of mortuary sciences boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. All in the quest to understand what happens when we die, the one thing that at the end days, everyone fears most.

One morning, I walk outside to take out my trash. It is an early morning, the air is crisp, the grass is lightly kissed with dew, and the silence is strangely imminent. As I walk out to my trashcan and lift the lid, I find many flies scattering about. I can smell the fresh smell of death, not fresh as in fresh air, more like fresh fish. I look down and from the edge of the bag, I see a piece of raw meat and I know that is what attracted the files to my trash can. I open the bag, I look inside and what I find is something that is so beautiful that my heart fluttered in excitement and I was compelled to watch. It was a piece of raw chicken, as I pull this meat from the bag, I lay it on the grass and I see what looks like squirming grains of rice under the skin of the chicken. It was a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These can't be rice grains. They are not. They are young flies, better known as maggots or larvae.

As I examine this chicken, I see some of the larvae concentrated on the edge; under the bluish and transparent skin I see them clearly. They are eating the subcutaneous fat. They love fat. They are spaced out, moving slowly. It's beautiful, under the thin layer of skin are these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath the surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things so you really appreciate and learn from this experience. I lower my head within one foot of this chicken breast and I hear the beautiful sound of larvae feasting. The sound is very clear and known, its sounds just like a bowl of Rice Krispes. The larvae are plump, almost transparent, quite healthy. They have been well taken care of feeding on my meat scraps in the trash can. The sounds are like a beautiful symphony of tissue digestion and the circle of life at its finest. I could never just throw this beautiful art away, so I take the maggots and their meal and find them a shaded, cool, safe spot to continue their job and grow up into adult flies and repeat the process. That is the circle of life, after all.

It has been 5 days now; the maggots are still feasting on the meat. Where before they had been grains of rice, here they are cooked rice. They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. They are now a week older than they were when I first found them, they look great. Flourishing, well nourished, happy little maggots.

That is the story of a chicken decaying and still being utilized in the circle. While to most, the mental picture of a rotting piece of meat covered in maggots and flies in this sort of detail might seem uniquely horrifying, this research is an integral part of mortuary science. By charting the process of decay, particularly human decomposition, it enables us to know a time of death simply by the insects that inhabit the cadaver. For example, maggots are only present in the first few stages of decay (Fresh, bloating and active decay stages) because they can only feed of certain bacteria in the body, once the maggots leave you are in the last process of decay, putrefaction and advanced decay. Only at this stage do carnivorous beetles come and start to consume what the maggots cannot break down, the muscles and skin.

Perhaps the next time you see this beautiful process of decay you can take a minute to appreciate all that is involved with breaking down tissue and a body. It is after all, nature's way of cleaning up the remains of all organic matter, including the remains of your body.