Memento Mori

[jadelennox]

DEAR ABBY: I need a second opinion. My grandfather sold me an old farmstead that has been in the family for 200 years. Last week, he showed me a wooded area behind the barn with a human skull. He told me that when his father died more than 50 years ago, he was curious about how long it would take a body to decompose, so he left his body in the woods to keep track of its progress. He has 50 years' worth of pictures and notes. He told the rest of the family that Great-Grandpa had been cremated, and apparently no one questioned him about the ashes.

At this point, the skull is all that's left. I checked with a lawyer, who tells me that in my state no laws were broken. That said, I don't want my great-grandfather's skull sitting in the woods behind my barn! My husband says I should quietly bury it, burn the pictures and the notes and forget about it. That just doesn't feel right to me.

It feels like I'm helping my grandfather get away with something and it feels "icky." Should I tell the rest of the family, or continue allowing them to believe that Great-Granddad was cremated? I'm resenting my grandfather for putting me in the middle of this, and any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. — BOUGHT MORE THAN I BARGAINED FOR

--

DEAR BARGAINED: Your letter is a first. Why do I get the impression that your grandfather must have HATED his father to have treated his remains so disrespectfully? The farmstead and everything that goes with it is yours now to keep or dispose of.

What you need to do is decide whether to donate your great-grandfather's skull to a medical or dental school (or coven?), place it in a columbarium or bury it on your property. As to whether to tell the rest of the family, what positive thing would be accomplished by sharing this unpleasantness with them? You are a caring individual; let your conscience be your guide.

via

Comments

[castiron]

I'd lean towards calling a forensics unit and asking if they want the notes and photos -- after all, there are body farms that people donate their corpses to, and while this wasn't a voluntary donation, the records might still be useful for research!

[green_grrl]

This was the first thing I thought of, too.

[ethelmay]

The grandfather is still living, right? And isn't what he did with his grandfather's remains a crime? I don't get the impression that the grandchild wants to get the grandfather in trouble with the law.

In my state unlawful disposal of human remains is a misdemeanor, but I think they're talking mostly about dumping ashes where you hadn't ought to. An actual decomposing body must carry a higher penalty, no?

[ethelmay]

I mean his father's remains (typo). Oh, also I somehow didn't see the bit about her having consulted a lawyer. I still find it difficult to believe it isn't somehow against the law (if nothing else, due to the health risk of leaving a bunch of decaying meat around - obviously wild animals' bodies sit around, but I had the impression that even a dead cow or something that was your property you were required to responsibly dispose of).

[redbird]

Different states' laws are worded differently, and may have different exceptions. In one of Seanan McGuire's Incryptid novels, a character mentions that burying someone privately on land you own is legal in Oregon but illegal in Washington.

Improperly disposing of human remains probably has a statute of limitations, in which case the LW can base the decision on what will cause other relatives the least pain.

Less relevantly, there's a Dorothy Sayers story in which two men are arguing over whether to bury their recently-deceased father, or to move the embalmed corpse to an above-ground mausoleum.

[conuly]

I think Abby's right - LW needs to let sleeping dogs lie. Bury the remains and take this secret to the grave. There is no benefit to ratting Grandpa out, even though it's sickening that he'll get away with fifty years of lying.

[ethelmay]

It may be very weird of me, but it bothers me to think of her getting rid of the pictures and notes altogether, though she certainly has the right to. It seems as though someone might as well learn something from them (if only about the kind of person who would do such a thing).

[conuly]

Only if it can be done without hurting the rest of the family.

[lilysea]

Am I the only one wondering if this was done to avoid needing to get a death certificate from a coroner,

and if great-grandfather died of natural causes, or if great-grandfather was
"helped along" ?

[dissectionist]

If it’s an unexpected death, EMS get called and the death determination will be made by doctors after EMS brings the patient into the hospital. If the death occurs at home and was expected, a homecare doctor (or in some areas, homecare nurses can as well) will certify the death. Only if a healthcare professional is suspicious about the death or a crime was involved will it be elevated to an medical examiner or coroner, because there are a whole lot of deaths and not many coroners.

Realistically, what this means is that sometimes we do miss homicides when they’re in people that were likely to die anyway. So unless this was a horrifically obvious murder, I don’t think Grandpa would have had to fear much from the death of a person who was of an age where everyone expected them to die of old age anyway.

And if you really want to know something horrifying, coroners are elected officials who don’t even need to have any medical training. So a homicide that isn’t obvious could easily slip past plenty of coroners. (Medical examiners do have to be doctors, though not necessarily forensic pathologists, and this is why everywhere should abolish the antiquated coroner system and switch over to having MEs instead.)

[lilysea]

To be clear, my thinking was

"funeral homes and cemeteries and crematoriums all require death certificates. What if great-grandfather was buried at home so that grandfather didn't have to provide a death certificate from ANYONE,

eg, the death certificate was never signed until after the body was well-decomposed,

or possibly not even then?"

[dissectionist]

Assuming LW is writing recently, 50 years ago would put us into the mid-70s. That’s modern enough that not having a death certificate would make a whole lot of things (like transferring title of the property, inheritance, etc.) impossible.

Getting a death certificate after the body was well-decomposed would have likely invited a lot more suspicion, because unless the story was that Great-Gramps went missing and then was found weeks later, there’d be natural questions about why the death hadn’t been called in promptly and why the body had left or put outdoors.

Based on the fact that a lawyer was consulted and didn’t see anything dodgy, I’m inclined to think the death was just a death. It would have been simple for him to pass at home, the doctor or nurse signs the certificate, and Grampa says he’ll call the funeral home. Everyone leaves and Grandpa puts Great-Gramps in the woods instead.

I don’t necessarily agree with the letter response that doing so is automatically disrespectful, as I know people (including myself) who genuinely feel like a green decomposition in nature is the best way to go. Embalming and cremation and so forth just isn’t for everyone. (If I wasn’t donating my body to my old anatomy lab, I’d donate it to a body farm.) Whether it’s disrespectful or not depends entirely on what GG wanted. If he was saying stuff like, “When I go I want to stay on the farm,” as some people do when they have deep ties to a place, then Grandpa might have just been following his dad’s wishes (albeit in an unusual way).

That being said, I wouldn’t have been able to watch my own parents or other loved ones decompose, even though I’m a medical researcher who cuts up dead critters regularly and loved working in an anatomy lab. But others may not have the same sentimentality, and it could even have been part of the grieving process to document the body’s return to the earth. In many cultures (including mine until about 1900) it was traditional for family to tend to the deceased’s body. Squeamishness about the bodies of deceased loved ones is a modern phenomenon and isn’t universal even nowadays, so maybe this guy was just psychologically closer to the old ways than many of us are now.

[minoanmiss]

adds your job to the list of topics I want to ask you about One Day

[ethelmay]

What I wondered (yes, I read too many murder stories) is whether it even was Great-grandpa. (I suppose the successive photos probably do prove it is, if there are known photos of Great-grandpa in life to compare the early ones to.) Or if Great-grandpa was the only one out there. It does kind of matter whether Grandpa is a murderer, seems to me.

I'm also thinking that if this is a real story, and the sale of the land was recent, it might not be too difficult for someone in the area to hear of it and figure out who's being referred to.

[melannen]

Yeah, one does wonder *why* he needed to know how human bodies decompose...

[falkner]

Why do I get the impression that your grandfather must have HATED his father to have treated his remains so disrespectfully?

What a weird assumption to open the response with.

[cimorene]

This is an area where the taboos are very much cultural, including the definitions of respect, but not shared by everybody in society by any means. Yet the people with Abby's traditional view often seem to be completely unaware that other attitudes exist around them.

[falkner]

I was born and raised in a predominantly Christian (catholic) country, and the norm even just 20-10 years ago was still to keep at home the bodies of anybody who died of old age to give family and loved ones a chance to visit and mourn, so my first impression of the letter was, "The grandpa must have loved his father too much to let the body be taken away from his home" instead! I guess I never thought too deeply about what "traditional" means in other places (that in this case I assume are also predominantly Christian) in regards to death.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I definitely meant traditional American in this case!

[oursin]

I suppose it depends a lot on local laws, but my impression is - and again, this is local laws - is that things have tightened up even more or less Within My Own Lifetime.

I.e. in my career as an archivist we received some papers of a historian of public health which included, in a plastic shopping bag, some bones they had been given from an excavation when a burial site was discovered while digging the foundations for a new Tesco supermarket.

In Broad Street, Soho. One of their subjects was cholera in London.

The diggings actually turned out to be a C17th plague burial pit*.

But disposing of the bones, when legislation on the subject had significantly tightened up, was a real headache. In the end we donated them to the Museum of London to rejoin the rest of the output of the dig.

But this one is is real quandary - was grandpa a thwarted forensic pathologist obliged to take over the family farm?

*Nobody came down with plague in our offices.

[lilysea]

For fuck's sake, human remains that could have cholera or bubonic plague should be in sealed packaging that is as air tight as you can make it

even a double-bagged or triple-bagged large zip loc bag inside a foam esky that had been sealed shut with duct tape would have been better

[oursin]

Yes, all very bad practice, but maybe common habit at the time - supposition that they were called in because of their known expertise on Broad Street, but cannot imagine what the archaeologists were thinking, handing out souvenirs.

More recently I remember the hoohahs over plague-pits discovered during the recent Crossrail excavations.

[firecat]

I must run with a different crowd because my reaction is approximately “that’s so geeky, I wish he were MY grandfather” and imagining my family laughing about how wacky it is rather than being horrified (although I think the “how wacky” reaction would be more likely if grandfather had already passed.)

Probably best I am not a mortician.

[minoanmiss]

The funeral industry could use a dose of your philosophy but they probably wouldn't react well.

[sporky_rat]

A lot of us also have that feeling of "that's so cool and geeky", I assure you, we're just constrained by a lot of the elder generation of the industry.

[minoanmiss]

Bwee :)

[melannen]

It really stands out to me that nowhere in this letter is there a mention of what gg would have wanted - maybe LW doesn't know and doesn't know how to ask anyone without explaining why.

But if Grandpa got away with "he's cremated, no funeral or memorial" it seems likely that GG was an "I don't give a damn what happens to my body when I'm dead, throw it behind the woodshed" type and most of the family knew. (Many of my older relatives have been like that, and while we didn't take any of them that literally - because it's very illegal here - I don't think it would be disrespectful if we did.)

If he wanted something different it's different, but if nobody objected to a quiet cremation he probably didn't.

And if it is more or less what he wanted, tossing the notes seems less respectful that finding someplace that might be able to use them somehow.

[laurajv]

tbh I would probably buy a grave marker and bury the skull at the original site and park the stone over it. then at least in another 50 years when someone finds a femur or w/e there's evidence of a grave, to alleviate panic. Although I don't know how long femurs will last, exposed.

[full_metal_ox]

Is it just me, or is this a gift-wrapped writer’s prompt?

[minoanmiss]

Not at all just you.

[mildred_of_midgard]

This is a Yuletide nomination waiting to happen.

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if any Wacky Local Histories projects would want the skull, photos, and notes. It seems like an appalling family secret, but such a Fascinating thing that would be amazing to learn about (after the people in the family who could be hurt by it are dead).