Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: baby, body parts, brain, bury, cremation, dust, exhume, gall bladder, hair, kidney, macabre, relic, religion, religious, remains, shrapnel, stone, stories, teeth, toe
I was packing up a long lock of hair to mail off to Locks of Love and started thinking about all the pieces of human bodies that we save for sentimental purposes. Picasso is rumored to have saved all his hair and nail clippings and even cataloged them with dates. He was afraid of witchcraft. I have all my children’s baby teeth. A little baby food jar of bloodied gems. I saved them because I pulled them and when I handle them I can still feel the cringe that grasped me each time I plucked a sharp little tooth from their mouths.
My mother was a nurse in the forties. She and her whole graduating class divied up the skeleton they studied by. She got a toe. She keeps it in her jewelry case. A stranger’s toe for which she harbors a strange reverence. On the other side of my family there is a story that a bar of soap came here from a concentration camp. It so bothered the wife of the soldier that she buried it in a home made ceremony in her back yard. It is most likely a myth that the soap was of human origin but the tale is there just the same. It’s the tale that makes it real, so I want to hear your body part stories. Don’t just tell me that your mother has all your baby teeth or your first lock of hair. I want to know the who, what, where, when and why of all those skeletons in your closets. Along the way, I’ll tell my stories.
It struck me that there are millions of us who keep parts of family members, pets, even strangers for unspoken reasons. Is it reverence? Love? Religion? What is your reason? Is it akin to keeping a religious relic? Nothing is too strange or too normal to discuss.
I know someone who buried her pet in a foam ice chest so that she could exhume the remains when she moved. There are people who have their dear pets taxidermied. Some of us keep things that doctor’s remove from our bodies, gall stones, kidney stones, parasitic twins.
Don’t just tell me that you have a golf ball sized kidney stone that was made into a ring. Tell the story. Have you visited places that hold human body parts as relics? Lets stick the spade in the ground and see what turns up.
