All worms go to heaven.
I was so sure of myself. These worms needed a funeral.
It was Nebraska in the 90s, at a strict Catholic school that looked like a stripped-down detention center. It depends on the day and my corresponding shade of nostalgia. Some days I remember it as a harmless hub bustling with candy-distributing librarians, and on other days, like the worm day, there’s a depressing sepia-colored lens through which I look.
This was a somewhat manicured part of America’s conservative heartland, and I was a younger, less cool version of Ben Fold’s “Rockin the Suburbs…” so naturally, living within the walls of such a highly structured world, I suppose it makes sense that I found small ways to conduct mischievous experiments. Tiny indulgences that offered a sense of creative liberation.
As a fifth grader, one such cathartic operation was a homemade newspaper. Think The Onion in miniature. It was an elementary attempt at satire, heavy on political scandal and disproportionately obsessed with a burgeoning household marvel: the Procter & Gamble Downy Ball. But my true magnum opus? Worms.
Digging for them, specifically.
When thinking about how this hobby started, it was almost certainly because of a combination of unfiltered childhood imagination and bleak entertainment options in the pre-iPhone era (sigh). But maybe, on a more physiological level, it was my way to pursue harmless, weird, and just subversive enough projects to feel a rush of adrenaline and purpose.
One day, during what I later came to call The Year of Our Worm, I was preparing to lead my comrades on our daily recess mission. Armed with the unwavering confidence of a worm-hunting operative who firmly believed in her cause, I felt invincible. Purposeful. Heroic, even.
We skipped and hopscotched to the upper right-hand corner of the designated “play area,” which, truthfully, was just a generous patch of flat land with a few half-hearted swings and a slide, only to discover something horrific.
Our excavation site had been paved over with concrete.
At some point, likely under the stealthy cover of a Tuesday night, a dump truck had unceremoniously excreted a perfect square of composite material, sealing off a 3-foot-by-3-foot slice of sacred ground.
To us, it was the visual equivalent of a piano falling from the sky onto an unsuspecting cartoon character.
The fury. The disbelief. Michaela, a trusted confidante and co-digger, collapsed to her knees. Eyes welled. My heart faltered.
We stood in a state of mourning because, for all we knew, these worms were dead and gone. And on top of that trauma, but less obvious to us in that moment, an outlet for creativity and self-made joy had been ripped away, tangentially causing small pieces of our souls to crumble a bit.
The popes have historically disagreed on the existence of animal souls, but this complicated record was not at the forefront of my concerns as a youth. I was definitely more interested in my Lisa Frank sticker collection than pre-my-lifetime papal remarks. It’s well-known though, to Catholics mainly, that Pope Pius IX always supported the doctrine that dogs and other animals have no consciousness beyond this life. But then, did Pope John Paul II refute that in 1990 and say, yes, they do!? According to the New York Times, “Pope John Paul II …… proclaimed that animals do have souls and are ‘as near to God as men are.’ But the Vatican did not widely publicize his assertion, perhaps because it so directly contradicted Pius, who was the first to declare the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1854.”
Whether or not Pope John Paul II allegedly said animals are amazing in 1990, I was stuck in the practically pre-internet Midwest where we were still singing mass in Latin. So, in 1997, this half-assed declaration about animal afterlife hadn’t made its way to our religious syllabi.
All of this to say, Catholic funerals are reserved for honoring human souls, so worms are not entitled to such events. Apparently, I was supposed to have known this hard “truth” decided by old men.
At the worm crime scene, a proclamation was made, and planning began. I don’t think many of us had been to a real funeral, but we’d seen it in movies and thought it’d be the proper thing to do. Someone would bring candles. Someone would sing a hymn. There would be marching and maybe a crucifix. It was going to be legit.
But of course, curious eyes and upset souls were about, and the sight of the worm funeral was too cult-like or too replicative of actual Catholic funeral proceedings. The nuns were alerted and, obviously, not pleased. Ultimately, the instigators of this blasphemous event were identified and summoned to the principal’s office.
In 1521, Martin Luther was called to Worms, Germany.
Before this, he’d been busy writing the 95 Theses, which questioned a lot of Catholic teachings and practices. The main culprit in the eyes of Luther was the church’s use of indulgences. It’d be nice if that just meant priests were overly enjoying their share of pudding and tarts, but it actually meant religious leaders were making money offering to absolve sins partially or fully. You could also buy departed souls a one-way ticket to Heaven if they’d been sitting in Purgatory rotting for too long.
According to Britannica, “A Dominican friar in Northern Germany was credited with hawking indulgences for the dead by saying, ‘When a penny in the coffer rings, / A soul from Purgatory springs.’”
Meanwhile, Luther was like: Yo, this is corrupt, and salvation should be free. This created a sticky situation for the Catholic church from Germany to Rome and eventually led to the infamous Diet of Worms.
Standing before an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, Luther was called upon to respond to heresy. Were these writings really his? Did he stand behind his heretical statements? Recant or be excommunicated!
Instead of repudiating his life’s work, Luther proclaimed: “Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other…” and set off Renaissance bellringing across Europe.
“So, I’ve been informed there was a funeral for worms at recess.” Sister Mary Carmel was probably not to blame for the concrete, but I was sending misdirected anger and fear in her direction anyway.
We were sitting opposite her looking like headlight-stricken deer, wearing plaid skirts, and me specifically, sporting bangs that looked like a small turd curl.
She was leaning forward with arms folded on the desk. As her spectacles slid down her nose, my eyes were diverted to her chin mole that always had three angry hairs sticking out in homage to the snakes on Medusa’s head.
We immediately admitted to the act breathlessly and fearfully, hyper aware of the Crucifix hanging with intensity on the wall behind her.
There was a very grave verbal reminder that, because animals don’t have souls, this “funeral” came across as a sarcastic take on the sacraments. And because we were tackling the role of the priest, who is acting on behalf of God, we were playing GOD! It was a textbook opportunity for training a youngling about sacrilege, blasphemy, and the likes.
If this had been my own personal Diet of Worms, my response was not worthy of the history books. My proud turd curl started to droop, my confidence disintegrated, and a new and noteworthy sin was added to my confession list.
Later on, I’d recall this story during cocktail parties and work lunches, thinking it was a “fun fact” about my life. But recently, the person hearing my story looked concerned and called it traumatic. I realized, as one does when you slowly start to comprehend that certain concerning adult traits might be due to traumatizing childhood incidents, that maybe this story held more gravity than I had originally thought.
“Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.”
- America Ferrera, “Barbie”
I’d been reprimanded, told I was wrong for trying to honor something in the only way my fifth-grade brain knew how. That burst of imagination got flattened into a miserable blob of “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
The more I was pushed to be perfect morally, academically, spiritually, the more rebellion started growing inside me like a malfunctioning Chia Pet. It wasn’t loud at first, but it was persistent.
And honestly, I wouldn’t go back and tell that version of me that I was wrong or overreacting. Those moments, of authority steamrolling creativity, taught me how tightly the world can grip your sense of self. Fighting back, even in weird or petty ways, became essential.
So, I got creative. After the worms, one of my greatest grade-school stunts involved placing a tuna melt on top of the tampon dispenser in the girls’ bathroom, just to see what would happen. It lived there for months, souring the air like a citrus-scented crime scene.
I also once hurled my pencil case out a fourth-floor window. Not out of anger, just curiosity. I wanted to see if it would land on a small child.
While writing this very essay, my dog Jackson died.
He was noble and ridiculous and sweet in all the right ways. He had an inexplicable fear of anything that moved and a habit of sighing after a not-long day. He was family, in every messy, loving, soul-bonded sense of the word. And when he passed, I found myself needing to know, again, if animals had souls.
I re-Googled the papal declarations, hoping for clarity, but all I found was a frustrating patchwork of contradictions. It reminded me of that day back in fifth grade, staring at the concrete where our worm colony once thrived, being told by some joyless authority that what I believed was wrong. That my feelings were invalid. That wonder had a limit.
But I know better now.
I know the institutions we grow up in, religious, educational, societal, are often built on rules meant to organize, not to understand. And sometimes, in their attempt to define what’s sacred, they miss the sacred entirely.
Worms may not get funerals. Dogs may not get rosaries. But I’ve stopped asking permission to believe what feels intuitively right.
Because Jackson had a soul. I felt it every time he looked at me with tired eyes full of love and judgment. And those worms, ridiculous as it sounds, deserved their ritual. They were part of something meaningful to us, something created in the vacuum of restriction. That makes them holy in their own way.
The concrete came. The nuns came. The world told me no.
But that moment cracked something open.
It was the beginning of my life-long distrust of man-made certainty, the first glimmer that questioning “truth” is sometimes the most faithful thing you can do. I’ve since grown up, lost people, loved deeply, grieved hard, made peace with ambiguity, and still, still, whenever I think about the worms, I think:
All worms go to heaven.
Even if the pope doesn’t say so.