The Bug Hotel

By Sue Harper

In the churchyard where my mother is buried, local environmentalists have just installed a bug hotel. It is beautifully crafted: different textures, different size holes, different coloured woods. I tend my mum’s grave every week, and at first I was discomfited by the bug hotel. The flowers growing on her grave sprang, I always thought, from her body. It fed them from the rich tilth. Would the insects now be feasting on my mother? She had been dead 5 years: would they find enough for sustenance? It worried me a lot.

Then I noticed that the hotel was gradually attracting inhabitants: bees (I was ignorant about the type), beetles (ditto), a few small spiders, some industrious ants. I watched it every week. It began to fill up. I sat and observed every time I went, and it was clear that the insects were taking food back to their homes. They were feeding their babies perhaps, or storing up food against a harsh winter.

That changed how I felt. I began to think that they were welcome to my mum’s corpse. After all, her body had carried her through life: walking, running, dancing. I recalled her saying that she was too old to be an organ donor, but she hoped that her skin might be good for something: grafts, burns. And so it was, perhaps. The insects had found her: and they were converting her flesh into sustenance. The cycle was complete, and my anxieties fell away. In my heart, in the evening light, I blessed the bugs: they had made her live again.

Inspiration: The inspiration for my story is a real bug hotel in the local churchyard where my mum is buried. As I watched its progress, it reconciled me to my mother’s death as nothing had ever done before. She is part of nature now.

Photo by Sue Harper

In a former life, Sue Harper wrote many books on British cinema. She now only writes fiction, and her recent book of short stories (The Dark Nest, published by Egaeus Press) sold out very quickly. She is currently preparing a new collection, The Sarah Chronicles. www.sueharper.co.uk