On the Subject of Souls (Their Bodies and Ours)
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The Issue of Bones
I keep wondering about the skin [of the mummies]. Stretched taut.
Melted. Broken free of the body it was bound to in life. Initially I didn’t know how I’d feel when visiting the bones in the charnel houses or the crypts.
[The questions I had of will it smell? Or, will I be scared? Are all so irrelevant now].
When stepping into St Ursula’s [the first Charnel I visited, in Cologne], I was completely overcome.
Not a sadness or fear or a disgust.
Just a knowing.
An awareness.
It came straight up from my chest to land in
[and around]
my throat
[expanding].
It didn’t constrict, the way those sorts of things can.
It was just a certainty. [A recognition of presence]
of what was present, and of what had been.
Those eleven or eleven thousand young girls,
all martyredmurdered and their bodies rescued. Cared for. Looked after and preserved; for so many hundreds of years. The limb bones on the walls spelling out:
​
ST URSULA, PRAY FOR US
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Please, pray for us and we’ll watch over you.
We will watch over the children.
Children who,
despite everything,
have survived through care.
Placed in a crypt with a vaulted ceiling; a ceiling
adorned with stars that promise heaven,
of being brought closer to that final peace.
It’s a Christian tradition, yes, but those are children being comforted in the same way I’d look upwards to the glow-in-the-dark stars above my bed.
Stars reassuring me I needn’t fear the dark.
​
I’m writing about ‘presence’, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m referring to [certainly not how to verbalise it]; I’m still trying to figure it all out. I suspect I will be for a long time. This ‘presence’ is perhaps the reason I get such strong reactions when I tell people of my visiting charnel houses. Shock and disgust at the assumed morbidity; confusion as to why one would be ‘obsessed with death’. I’m not. At all. It all comes down to the bodies really. What they are, what they mean to us. Whether they retain life or just support it. If there is a soul [and I do believe that there is something], I know it isn’t tethered to a body. But the body isn't a mere vessel – not just a vehicle to carry us. We’re more than flesh, but it's undeniable to me that our flesh is too. More than itself, I mean.
​
A body holds markers of life: of age and of health. Sex. Physical trauma. Strength. A skull’s texture can tell us a person’s first language. But more than that. More than an individual life. Multi-generational experience and patterns spanning decades. Epigenetics. The inexplicable things we’re born with - those less tangible markers.
If bodies meant nothing post-life, then why do we save them? Or at least, why go to such lengths to not throw them away? Logistically, charnel houses – broad as the tradition is – are often to do with a city or town growing around a burial space, leaving no room for graveyard expansion. The bodies are taken out of the ground after around ten years – after they’ve decomposed – freeing up some high value real estate for the more recently deceased. Obviously, we can’t just throw the skeletons out [though this, of course, has been done many a time. Either that or anonymously sold to the wealthy/ethically purchased by educational institutions], the wish is to treat the old bones well, so they’re stored elsewhere, in places that become charnels.
​
That’s just one tradition though [charnel houses].
​
In the final year of my undergraduate degree, I read A Tour of Bones by Denise Inge. Inge’s family moved into a vicarage that was built atop a charnel. Whilst the family knew of the ossuary, it didn’t become a reality until it was reopened by a university to add some recently excavated anglo–saxon babies. Inge wrote how wrong it felt that the remains of so many stillborn children should simply be added to the heaps of disordered bones. She found living alongside - on top of - so many of the dead, incredibly disturbing. And decided that she had to face that fear and uncertainty. Inge was a writer and historian, full of words and questions she embarked on a pilgrimage through Europe visiting the remaining charnel houses, examining her relationship with bodies in death. Towards the end of her journey, when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, her attention shifted from mortality in general, to her own. Her own discomfort at, and understanding of death. Of what bodies mean. The book was published a year or so after her pilgrimage. Posthumously.
I’d never been to the ossuary under her house. I’d never seen those bones, never even heard of the Worcester charnel until I read that book and yet... I knew it.
​
I felt I’d known it.
​
I hadn’t really, but it was familiar.
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What – or who – I’d known, was Denise herself.
​
She and her husband had been close friends of my grandparents.
​
I’d grown up visiting their family in the Vicarage Above The Charnel.
​
Unlike Inge, I’d been unaware of what was beneath my feet. I doubt the fact would have bothered me; it probably would’ve seemed more exciting than anything else. My preteen self would have been thrilled at the chance of the mystery. I’d have told myself that no one else knew about the bones; or if they did, it was a fiercely guarded secret. The Vicarage backed onto the river Severn. I remember their grandchildren telling me how when it overflowed, the lower half of the steep garden could go underwater. At the time I imagined the worms and insects who lived under the grass floating in a temporary marsh. Now, I see the bones being raised out of their piles, in a cellar full of water. Somehow, rearranging back into skeletons, curling up into a foetal position, as bog bodies do, or maybe even dancing, as if the femur had never been separated from tibia.
[What is it about bodies that means we resist throwing them out entirely?]
​
My grandparents are dead now.
​
The pain of their absence has grown lighter, but I’m still rocked often, by the understanding that they will never be here again. These two figures; huge in their accomplishments, both reduced to ash.
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My family feels smaller than it ever has.
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It isn’t fair.
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I lost them both whilst at university. My grandma only managed two years without my grandpa. But in those two years, she was the most tangible she’d ever been.
​
A person, not just a grandma. But maybe that was as much to do with my aging as it was to do with hers. Her frailty had always been nothing more than an aesthetic until it had consequences. It had never occurred to me that her size wasn’t just a lack of height until I was looking at her in the hospital bed, suddenly aware of how small she was. How weak she must be. It wasn’t out of vanity, more that once my grandfather died, she did too. She felt her relevance deteriorated at the same rate as his illness progressed. She was here, but determined to not be; understood it as her time to go. Seeing her in the hospital, body framed by a plastic mattress, her hand papery in mine – it felt as if her skeleton would succumb to gravity, and fall to the bed. Slipping out of both my grip and her own skin. Her bones falling, the tissue of her hand remaining in mine. In life, it was easier to love my grandpa. Easier for everyone.
​
The man of the house. Of the family.
He deserved that love.
She was difficult; snide and jealous. Mean, often.
​
She taught me to sew. Taught me the importance of patience in mending.
Her death tore me open.
​
I knew them well as a grandchild; I’m unsure I’ll ever be able to express the deep pain I feel at being unable to meet them as an adult. In Denise’s book, her own exploration of death became the conversations we hadn’t been able to have. The things I only thought to ask – felt any immediacy in asking – once they were dead. I loved them both, I always had, but once they died I realised how much I didn’t know. I found things out that I wish I hadn’t; about their relationship, their loyalty. I panicked about their politics and then panicked about whether it really mattered. My grandma was a hoarder [this was something we’d always known. She was a post-war child through and through]. But searching through their things we found more than we ever expected to, fewer and fewer answers. Endless amounts of things. Under beds and in boxes, backs of cupboards and rooms we didn’t know existed. Drawers full of letters dating back hundreds of years. Tinned food that went out of date in ‘87 [they moved to the house in ‘92]. Two plaits of my grandmother’s hair, cut when she was twelve, stuffed in the back of a side cupboard. Religious memorabilia. A diary entry of my Mother’s, recording when they got their first coloured television. Wardrobes full of expensive clothes, all with tags still on. A little box full of baby teeth. Notes from letters we couldn’t find. Books and books and books and books. More sewing things than I’ve ever seen in one place before or since.
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I realised I didn't know them. They had entire lives before me; of course, I’d always known this, always known that at least fifty something years had preceded me. But I’d always thought of it as two straight lines stretching out behind me.
Those were their lives. Two straight lines lasting for fifty five years.
Twenty more once I’d arrived.
Then the lines stopped.
Seventy five years total.
Each.
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Searching through the town house on the outskirts of Worcester, trying to make sense of everything we found, their lives were everywhere. No longer linear, the seventy-five years were all encompassing.
Of course it had never been linear – they had never been linear. You can’t reduce people to that.
It was everywhere.
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They were. They always had been.
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Reading about the charnel house in Worcester, the one they’d spent so much time existing on top of. Visiting their friends, unknowingly convening with the dead. It was One Last Connection, one last thread of conversation expanding between us: between myself, Aggie, Bapa, and Denise. That link helped me to forgive. Forgive the things I didn’t know before they left. Forgive that they never owed me an explanation for it anyway.
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As long as there have been people there have been traditions for the dead. Rituals and burials. Rites and prayers. Fire and song. Ashes scattered. Hidden. Logistics.
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And we’re buried. Buried burned broken and shared.
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In 2001, two Stone Age bodies were found in south Uist. Two bodies later nicknamed Frankenstein; both made up of multiple people; an arm from one person, a ribcage from another. Skull attached to someone else’s lower jaw. Forged together. Hundreds of years separating their individual lives, yet united in death. Frankenstein as the ultimate ancestor. Mummified separately then forged together. Capuchin monks in Brno, thrifty as ever, have one coffin for the monastery. After the service, they’re taken out of it, then laid to rest in rows alongside their brothers. Heads raised on bricks. Naturally mummified, their flesh shrunken; both too tight and too loose at the same time. Their skin becomes as ill fitting as the rags gifted to them upon passing. My grandparents' ashes are in hessian bags that match the thousands of others who’ve passed through that crematorium. The bags were buried together at Worcester Cathedral, blessed in service by Denise’s husband.
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Bones Do What They Are, They Remain.
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When I was a week away from turning four, my mother broke her back trying to escape being stuck between two cars. Her legs trapped, they were pulverised. Her bones, briefly, were dust.
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Her back? Twisted. Vertebrae protruding where they’re not meant to. Eventually her bones healed. The nerves did not.
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I had my lower jaw broken and my top jaw cut away from my skull by doctors who were rearranging my face. It was all from inside my mouth; the knife rested against my teeth and slid upwards into muscle.
Blade flush against incisors
Lip gripped by a unempathetic hand, yanking it away from its place framing my mouth
carving flesh from bone
fibres of muscle torn by a serrated edge.
One
by
one.
My face, my understanding of myself, the way I am imagined. Me. It was taken away, yanked and pulled ripped off.
I was torn open
I was eighteen and walked into the surgery by myself.
I saw the blades and the hammers hanging on the walls, laid out on paper sheets.
Don’t worry, these aren’t for you.
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They were for me; I knew it and they knew it. I knew all they’d do to me. [What else do you expect of a girl who, at age twelve, was told that there was ‘something wrong with her face’, and this surgery was the only way to fix it? For me at least, that meant six years of research]. So I knew. I knew the tools that would be used to prize my face open. Crack my jaw and remove bone. Slice through nerves.
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I don’t have any illusions of those doctors being any kinder than base necessity required them to be, in order to complete the surgery. The full healing took nearly a year, but I couldn’t eat or speak for months. Even now, when I get under the weather, the original bruises reappear.
My body remembers.
I like to think
though,
that even through the seven and a half hours of surgery,
I was calm.
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That although hammers and chisels and knives were being used on me, peeling my mouth and nose away from their place on my skull, I like to think that they held my face as far away from the violence as possible. Still attached at the bridge of my nose, [face] folded backwards. Inwards. The wrong way. But I like to think, that in those hours, in that theatre of rubber gloved anonymity, that my lips were pressed to my forehead.
A feat of modern medicine! Comforting myself with a kiss.
My face was removed, attached but barely. For a time I held my own death mask. A memento of myself.
So much of me is rooted in my appearance - not my weight or hair colour, how attractive I could consider myself. No, nothing so trivial as that. But when I look in the mirror I know how I take up space. I know my smile and the way I tilt my head to the right, I know I move my top lip an unusual amount when I talk and I know my right eyebrow acts of its own accord, often making regular comments appear sarcastic. I know what to expect.
That was taken from me
Oh sure, it was willing and consensual. But that certainty? Gone.
So why do bodies matter?
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I have screws in my face, scars on skin and bone. The face I have now is entirely different to the one I grew up with. My mother’s spine is broken. If it’s just a body, then she is just a paraplegic. My Grandparents' ashes are buried in decaying hessian bags. In Cologne, the children of St Ursula’s are meticulously cleaned and prayed over. The bones under Denise Inge’s house remain in their cluttered piles of babies and tibias and pelvises, only ever moving when the Severn floods, the water briefly animating the anonymous who rest there. Our experiences, our family history. Memory and perspectives. All convene and converge within us. Nothing is isolated, and it is all recorded. It all remains.
The body stores history. In turn, we store the bodies.