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agonyaunt2024-04-04 06:42 pm
Memento Mori
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
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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.
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and if great-grandfather died of natural causes, or if great-grandfather was
"helped along" ?
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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.)
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"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?"
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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.
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adds your job to the list of topics I want to ask you about One Day
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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.
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