I can't explain to someone who's never had to deal with dead bodies how harrowing Ye Li's story is, for context, in my culture, there no embalming no wait, nothing. Someone dies and by the next day usually they are bathed, changed into new clothes, small pooja, wrapped in a shroud, cremation. And in my caste specifically men usually do it for men and women usually do it for women. I'm the oldest in my generation. Oldest amongst almost 40 cousins so it has fallen on me to over see it 5-6 times and the speed of decomposition is slower than you anticipate. The latest we have done is 3 days and almost the entire bottom half of the body was purple liquid were leaking out.
Human have a evolutionary revulsion to all of it. 6 hours after death you can't really touch the skin without feeling disgust, by 12 hours rigor mortis had set in, by 24 liquids start leaking gases start visibly accumulation. This is why embalming is done in culture where viewing of the body is common. The only reason this responsible has fallen on me so many times is because i can stop myself from crying on command and control my revulsion to it.
What i am trying to say from this is ye li's reaction of blocking it all out is not insane at all. It's completely normal honestly. There is no way she moved and buried all the bodies in a day. It must've been weeks since she also dug the graves and labelled each once. By week 2 of keeping the bodies over ground in a humid weather the skin started falling off on touch.
I did all my funeral responsibilities over ground with a group of other people and in the sterile environment of a shamshanbhumi. And i felt so horrified/revolted by it. There is no way to explain what it's like, trying to move a stiff body unless you've done it.
I kind of regret watching this episode because it triggered such feeling inside me now i WILL justify anything and everything that Ye Li. Because honestly the death of maybe 5 people affected her emotionally but the having to bury anyone physically yourself will shake you to the core. That plus the physical excursion of moving the bodies that we heard had flies on them which means they well into decomposition. And having to dig the graves and make the headstones
After which digging one and making a headstones for yourself in case you get sick too. At that point if she was mentally fine i would've thought she was insane.
