There is a caterpillar inside a chrysalis right now that is doing something that should not be possible.
It is dissolving itself.
Not slowly, not gently. It releases enzymes that break its own body down almost entirely into liquid. What was a crawling, leaf-eating creature becomes something closer to soup. And from that soup, something winged and entirely new assembles itself from the inside out.
I have sat with a lot of dying. As a death doula, I have held space at bedsides and in grief rooms, I have helped people find language for the unlanguageable, and I have watched the way loss moves through a person like weather. And I keep coming back to this: the caterpillar does not resist the dissolving. It does not fight to stay a caterpillar. It surrenders to the process completely, and the process knows what to do.
I think about that a lot.
The Metamorphosis Metaphor Is Not a Metaphor
We reach for butterflies when we talk about grief and transformation almost automatically. They show up on memorial cards and sympathy gifts and tattoos worn over hearts. And I understand the instinct, I really do. But I think we are often using the image without really sitting with what it means.
Metamorphosis is not a gentle upgrade. It is not the caterpillar getting wings added on. It is the near-total destruction of one form so that another form can exist. The caterpillar has to stop being a caterpillar entirely before it can become anything else.
Grief works the same way. Real grief, the kind that actually moves through you and changes you, requires that you let go of the version of yourself that existed before the loss. The person who had the person you lost. The life that held the life that ended. You cannot carry that version of yourself all the way through and come out the other side unchanged. Something has to dissolve.
That is not a comfortable thing to say. But I believe it is a true thing, and I think insects have been trying to show us this for a very long time.
What Entomology Has Taught Me About the Cycle
I have been studying insects my whole life, and one of the things I love most about this work is how completely unsentimental nature is about death. Not cruel. Just honest.
A mayfly (Order Ephemeroptera) lives its adult life in a single day. Some species live only a few hours. They emerge, they find each other, they lay their eggs on the water, and they are gone. They do not mourn the shortness of it. They do not hold back. They do everything they came to do with the whole of themselves, and then they are done.
The luna moth (Actias luna) has no mouth. As an adult, it cannot eat at all. It lives only one to two weeks, spending every bit of its energy finding a mate and continuing the cycle. It came into this world already carrying everything it needed. It does not accumulate. It simply is, fully, for the time it has.
The scarab beetle (Family Scarabaeidae) rolls dung into balls and buries it as food for its young. The ancient Egyptians watched this and saw resurrection. They saw a creature taking what was dead and discarded and transforming it into new life, and they made it sacred. They were not wrong.
Every single one of these creatures is showing us the same thing: death is not the opposite of life. It is part of the cycle that makes life possible.
Sitting With What Remains
Part of my work as a death doula is helping people understand that there is nothing wrong with them for grieving the way they grieve. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a stage to pass through on the way to being okay again. It is love with nowhere to go, and it deserves to be honored.
The specimens I work with at Empoorium are part of this same philosophy. Every insect that comes through my hands lived a complete life. It flew and fed and found its way through the world. When it died, it left something behind: this astonishing physical record of what it was. Color and structure and the geometry of wings that no human hand designed.
I do not think of what I do as collecting dead things. I think of it as honoring what remains.
When I frame a specimen, I am saying: this life mattered. This creature was here. Look at what it left behind.
And when I sit with someone in grief, I am saying the same thing.
What This Means for You
If you are grieving right now, I want you to know that what you are feeling is not weakness. It is not something to push through or get over. It is the dissolving part. The part that feels like there is nothing left of you is the chrysalis stage, and I know from everything I have learned from insects and from grief that the chrysalis stage is not the end of the story.
Something is assembling in there. You cannot see it yet. But the process knows what to do.
If you are drawn to the beauty of natural specimens and what they carry, you are welcome to explore the pieces I have made with deep intention at empoorium.us. Each one was made to hold space for exactly this kind of wondering.
And if you just needed to read something today that does not pretend death is simple or grief is tidy, I hope this helped even a little.
You are not alone in the dissolving.
With love,
Elayne
Entomologist, death doula, and keeper of what remains