by Sarah Murray
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite nun who died of tuberculosis in 1897 aged twenty-four, is even more of a globetrotter—she’s so far visited more than forty countries. In 2002, her remains were sent to Baghdad in the hope that they could avert war in Iraq. In 2009, she visited twenty-eight destinations around the United Kingdom. Some of her relics have even been propelled into space to orbit the Earth.
Another celebrated nun, St. Teresa (the one Bernini depicted in the midst of sensual rapture in his marble masterpiece at St. Peter’s, Rome), had her body exhumed many times after she died in 1582 at the Spanish convent of Alba de Tormes (the corpse was said to be as fragrant as lilies), and various parts were removed each time. Her hand ended up with General Franco, the Spanish dictator, who kept it beside his bed at all times. But the most important piece of her, the heart, is displayed in a resplendent gold, silver, and glass case in the convent at Alba. Here is “organic matter” at its most sacred and spectacular—a recognizable piece of a human body, an organ that once kept that body alive, transformed into a holy shrine, speaking to us across the centuries.
Relics were also kingmakers. A translatio came to symbolize the transfer of power, and in the early medieval struggle for supremacy among Europe’s great cities, metropolitan rulers used relics to boost their civic stature, secular identity, and religious authority. Among the most desirable, of course, were the remains of the four evangelists, Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark. And if you didn’t have a relic to hand, you needed to get one from somewhere else.
In the ninth century, this is what the young city of Venice was bent on doing. The doge, Venice’s ruler, reckoned the body of Saint Mark would do nicely, legitimizing the city’s position on Europe’s fast-evolving map. But the way Venice secured the apostle’s remains was far from legitimate. Some call it the greatest heist in Christendom. The city didn’t have much of a claim to the relic in the first place. After all, at the time when the great saint was working on his gospel, Venice was still a marshy bog. And the trouble was, the evangelist’s body lay where he was martyred—in Alexandria, a city then under Muslim rule.
There are several versions of the story of Venice’s audacious theft, but my favorite is one I heard at a lecture given by an art history professor who clearly enjoyed telling the tale. Here’s roughly how it went:
Spreading rumors that Muslims were planning to desecrate Saint Mark’s relic, two Venetian merchants set off in a trading vessel to “rescue” the evangelist’s body from Alexandria. Their plan was to start a series of fires on arrival to distract the authorities while they retrieved their precious quarry. The first bit of the plan worked like a dream. But as luck would have it, news of their action escaped, and, with their ship about to depart, the merchants learned that customs officials were on their way to search the hold.
One of the two, a quick-thinking fellow, ran down to the local market and purchased a job lot of pork bellies, which he hauled back to the ship and packed around the saint’s body. When the officials arrived, the merchants waved their arms graciously in the direction of the hold, saying: “Go ahead and search the vessel. We won’t stop you.” Taking one look at the pork-packed hold, the Muslim officials thought better of it and sent the Venetians on their way. Back in Venice, the merchants presented the relic to the doge, who immediately installed it in his private chapel.
The story doesn’t end there. St. Mark’s presence in Venice transformed the city’s fortunes. Because the saint’s remains were kept by the doge—not the pope, local bishop, or any other religious leader—he was able to free the city from the heavy hand of Rome’s papal influence. Instead, he formed an inner circle of his own, appointing clerics to perform the city-state’s religious and administrative needs without interference from external ecclesiastical powers.
Similar authority is bestowed by one of the Buddhist world’s most important relics, for it’s believed that whoever possesses it has a sacred right to rule the land. This holy object—the tooth of Buddha, and supposedly the only relic left after his cremation—is in Kandy, a lush, leafy Sri Lankan town in hilly tea country. Housed near a royal lake inside the Dalada Maligawa, or Temple of the Sacred Tooth, it’s displayed to the public every five years.
When I visited Kandy in the 1980s, I waited patiently for several hours under the burning sun along with hundreds of Sri Lankans to get a glimpse of this most significant of incisors. In the temple’s inner sanctum, the tooth sat in a glass case surrounded by gold and silk decorations. It was, I remember, surprisingly large and rather yellow.
* * *
Perhaps the close relationship we have with human remains stems from our difficulty in accepting the vacuum created by death and the disappearance of a person’s materiality. We are left with “a gap you can’t see,” says Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, “and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.” As we struggle to fill that gap, we hang on to any scraps we can find.
The Victorians loved to keep tokens of the people they’d lost near them. Creating plaster death masks and hand casts was one way to do it. Photographing the recently deceased was another, with the subjects of these morbid portraits lying in their coffins or sometimes posed to look as if they were alive.
But the most tangible way of remaining close to a loved one was to keep part of their remains—a lock of hair. As a memento, hair has practical advantages. Consisting of filaments of protein that grow through the epidermis, hair stops living when it’s left the scalp, so once it’s cut it doesn’t deteriorate further.
Hair jewelry was popular as early as the seventeenth century. In his poem “The Relic,” John Donne hopes that if he and his loved one are ever exhumed, the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” will persuade the grave diggers to leave alone a couple who thought that “this device might be some way / To make their souls at the last busy day, / Meet at this grave, and make a little stay.”
The Victorians loved keeping hair in jewelry. The practice took off when Queen Victoria turned grieving into an art following the early death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. The inconsolable sovereign took to wearing black, and among the signs of her perpetual sorrow were lockets and other pieces of jewelry in which she kept curls of Albert’s hair.
Hair work soon became a popular memento among her citizens. To their precious lockets, they could add further strands as other family members died. Mourning lockets started being mass-produced, and hair work became an art. Encased behind glass or crystal in tiny pendants and brooches, hair was shaped into intricate designs using cross-hatching, weaving, netting, plaiting, feathering, or curling. At wealthy high-society funerals, hair-work trinkets might be given out to guests. In the budget version, families could send out commercially printed mourning cards with a locket of hair sewn onto them.
Around the same time, Americans also started seeking solace in mourning jewelry. Soldiers departing for the Civil War would leave a lock of hair with their wives in case the worst should happen. If the soldier died in battle, the widow would transfer the hair from one locket to another—a black one for mourning. Memorial rings or bracelets of twisted or woven hair allowed the bereaved to be in constant physical contact with a lost loved one. Pliable, durable, and portable, hair personified the dead and provided a focus for mourning. It became an iconic yet corporeal stand-in for the person who was so sorely missed.
If some Victorian practices seem a little morbid, today’s funeral industry offers contemporary versions that are not a million miles from their mementos. Gold pendants immortalize fingerprints, footprints, handprints, and thumbprints, or “Thumbies,” as Illinois-based Meadow Hill calls its keepsakes. A British company called DNA 11 creates customized pop art–style portraits (for both living and dead) based on lip and fingerprints, and DNA patterns taken from hair. For the dead, they are today’s versions of the death mask and the hand cast.
Like the Victorians, we seem to be drawn to the idea of hangi
ng onto pieces of the dead. But instead of hair, cremated remains have become today’s memento of choice, with lockets or charms in hearts, crosses, or crescents that contain tiny portions of ashes.
Armed with science and technology, the funeral industry can even use human remains as raw material for the jewels themselves. LifeGem, a Chicago-based company, extracts enough carbon from an eight-ounce portion of cremated remains to make a diamond that can be cut, certified, and inspected by gemologists. “It’s hard for people to accept that the person has gone,” says Dean VandenBiesen, LifeGem founder. “But having something physical and tangible to hang on to allows them to let go.”
Craftspeople who once had little to do with the funeral industry are finding a new market for their work. Neil Richardson, a Welsh potter, fires ashes into a vase using raku, a traditional Japanese ceramic technique. A company called Creative Cremains claims to be able to incorporate them in everything from musical instruments to fishing rods and walking sticks. Artist Michael Butler blends cremated ash into the oils he uses to paint pictures of the places where his clients scattered the rest of the remains. Meanwhile, Nick Savage, the Californian entrepreneur behind a company called Memory Glass, puts tiny amounts of human ash into paperweights and pendants. Trails of cremation dust swirl through the glass balls like tiny galaxies in space.
Do these objects help us accept loss, or are we just unable to let go? I’m not sure. Still, they slip easily into our design-conscious world, sitting alongside designer sofas and lava lamps, or on Georgian side tables and Victorian desks. Of course, they could also be seen as somewhat mawkish and slightly creepy. Let’s face it, few of us would consider displaying a piece of Granny’s femur on the mantelpiece, or keeping one of Dad’s teeth in a glass jar on a shelf in the study. But as paperweights, ceramic vases, and oil paintings, the dead fit right in.
That’s for the living. But funnily enough, the new art mementos also attract people looking ahead to their own deaths. Dean VandenBiesen told me that what motivated his brother Russell, when the siblings were developing the idea for LifeGem, was that he didn’t want his final resting place to be in a cemetery or an urn. “Rusty didn’t like his options,” said VandenBiesen. “He was worried about being forgotten.”
No longer convinced of spiritual eternity, it seems we’re starting to look for it on earth, seeking solace in an eternity that’s more tangible by leaving behind us biological evidence of our corporeal existence—a human life captured forever in a glass paperweight or stamped into a gold Thumbie.
* * *
I didn’t keep any of Fa’s ashes. At first I felt a tinge of regret about that. I even hesitated when, after we’d scattered his ashes, it came to throwing out the urn they’d come in. For some reason, I’d been putting this off, holding on to something, I’m not sure what. Sam said I was being ridiculous, and she was, of course, right. Certainly there was no sense in hanging onto a faux-bronze urn. If Fa was anywhere, it was on the hill where we did the scattering—and was he even there? But still, I asked her not to throw the urn out until the next time I was in Dorset.
One morning when I was visiting, Sam said it was time to get rid of the urn. The garbage truck would be passing the house that morning and she wanted to put it in with the other rubbish. The next question was how to dispose of it. Was it recyclable, we wondered? It probably was, since it was made of metal. But if we put it out on the road along with the tin cans, bottles, and jars, wouldn’t the garbage collectors be a little discomfited?
In the end, the planet lost out to our concern over the sensibilities of the garbage men. Sam wrapped the urn in an old cotton sheet to disguise its shape and then tied it into a plastic bag. Pleased with the result, she tossed it up into the air. “There you are!” she said brightly, as if it was nothing more than an empty piece of Tupperware.
But the incident got me thinking about what might happen to my own remains. Would I want myself trailed around inside a glass paperweight, mixed into an oil painting—or, for that matter, suspended beside hundreds of other human bones in an eccentric ossuary chandelier?
Funnily enough, I don’t find that particular idea altogether unappealing. Creating a little ghoulish amusement for tourists might be a tolerable way to end up. I love being useful. Of course, I could be most useful by donating my functioning organs to someone who needs them. Yet that still leaves the rest of me. And as someone who enjoys being intensely productive in life, I’d like to be so after my death. Having my remains perform some positive function would, it seems to me, be one of the best means of living on. Now I just need to find out what that function could be.
* * *
About two weeks before Christmas in 1981, the citizens of the small El Salvadoran mountain town named El Mozote were going about their business—shops were opening up, laundry was being hung out to dry, children were going to school. By the evening, most of the town’s population would be dead. One woman—one of the few survivors of the massacre—hid in a tree while U.S.-trained soldiers rounded up villagers, divided them into groups, and killed them before setting fire to the piles of bodies. Rufina Amaya lost her son, three daughters, and husband.
Susan Meiselas, a photojournalist who visited El Mozote after the massacre described the atmosphere: “A very haunted village. Nothing moving. A plaza with a number of destroyed houses. And total silence.”
For many years, the atrocity—the most violent incident of the Salvadoran civil war of the late 1970s—was kept secret, denied by both the government of El Salvador and the U.S. administration supporting it. Meiselas and the two journalists that reported the story, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post, came under fierce attack, accused of talking up flimsy evidence. Almost eleven years later, however, the remains of the dead finally confirmed the truth.
The bodies of those killed that day were uncovered by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology (EAAF, after its Spanish name), a nonprofit organization that investigates human rights abuses. When bone fragments are discovered, investigators complete an exhumation and examine circumstantial and other evidence surrounding what they’ve uncovered. The remains are then sent to a lab for DNA analysis that, by comparison with matching samples, can confirm their identity.
In El Mozote, the bones EAAF unearthed in and around the town corroborated Rufina Amaya’s account. However, the remains played another even more critical role. For the surviving members of the families, identification of the bones was a way of knowing what had happened to their relatives. The existence of remains meant they could at last hold the funeral.
Here’s where the work of the investigators goes far beyond science. “It involves a lot of social issues,” says Mercedes Doretti, a senior investigator at EAAF. She and her colleagues tread carefully when asking communities and families how they want to proceed following the discovery of remains. Dilemmas arise along the way. If, for example, the remains are commingled in a mass grave, how far should investigators go in trying to return a complete set of bones? “Should you inform a family, when you may have only a little piece?” says Doretti. “Or do you wait to see if the other parts of the body correspond to the same person?”
When someone dies, we need the evidence—sometimes as proof of a crime but also as a way of accepting the death. Governments, too, want the remains of their dead citizens accounted for. Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. administration has spent millions of dollars on finding those missing in action. In New York, the search continues for remains of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. By 2009, more than eight years later, 1,654 victims of the 2,752 reported missing had been identified.
Advances in technology have helped. Through DNA testing, identification can be ascertained from even microscopic pieces of remains. As recently as April 2009, the remains of a Windows on the World worker, fifty-four-year-old Manuel Emilio Mejia, were identified using new DNA technology that had not been available at the time of the 9/11 attacks. But whether it’s a pie
ce of bone or positive DNA identification, somewhere along the line, death demands the existence of remains as a trigger for grieving.
Without these remains, families who start mourning a lost relative can experience a terrible guilt. “Presumed dead” is very different from “confirmed as dead.” By saying good-bye before receiving that critical confirmation, they feel they’re abandoning the missing person. For this reason, Doretti is happy when she can find even the smallest bone splinter, because it provides the vital evidence of death. “You know that the news you’re going to deliver will be terrible for the families at the beginning,” she says. “But you also see that in the end, it’s a solace.”
While working on the El Mozote exhumations, Doretti listened to the story of a man who’d watched as soldiers killed his mother and set fire to her home. That night he returned to the house to recover her remains. All he found were a few charred pieces, which he placed on a roof tile and buried nearby. When EAAF arrived, Doretti asked him why he’d returned to the scene, with soldiers still in the area. He told her he couldn’t have left without finding his mother’s remains. Eleven years on, the fragments were exactly where he’d put them. The EAAF team exhumed them and he was finally able to give his mother a proper burial.
For most families, holding some form of funeral after the discovery of remains is essential. Even if the ceremony is for a fragment of bone, it marks the passing of the person from one state to the other—from disappeared to deceased. And, says Doretti, “even if twenty years have passed since their disappearance, it’s as if the person died the day before.”