Owning Bones

Jannie Stafford Edwards

The first time I found the skeleton was the summer I turned fifteen.

To ease the stupor of midsummer doldrums in our too-small Alberta town, my best friend Suzann and I decided to pitch a tent in the backyard. I went looking for camping gear in the basement junk room. I was sweating when I uncovered a battered metal trunk at the bottom of a ceiling-high pile of suitcases, paintings, old lamps, and tchotchkes. When I jimmied open the corroded latch and wrestled the groaning lid up a few inches, I was greeted by a human skull, its hollowed eye sockets and mouth gaping. I ricocheted back, screaming loud enough to catapult my mother downstairs.

When Mom arrived, breathless but relieved there was no blood, I cranked open the trunk lid to its full height so we could see the extent of its ossuary.

“Ask your father,” my mother sighed. When I caught up with Dad, he told me he had bought the male skeleton to study anatomy when he was a medical student in London in the late 1920s.

“You could buy a human skeleton?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t opened that trunk since before the war.”

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The discovery of a human skeleton in the basement fit the gothic aesthetic Suzann and I were cultivating that summer. It fit with the dawn pilgrimages we made to the town cemetery to wander barefoot among the graves. It fit with the horror stories we titillated ourselves with in the tent, stories which fed our scary dreams. It fit with our reading of Leonard Cohen’s Flowers for Hitler, which confused us, but which was a confusion we were seduced by.

We named the skeleton Claude, relishing our drawn-out, affected Frenchy pronunciation, rhyming it with slowed, with glowed—Clowed.

It wasn’t long before my brother found the skeleton in the basement, and not long before he uncoupled the femur bones from the articulated whole and snuck them into Suzann’s and my sleeping bags in the tent. Inspired by our screams, he danced around our tent with the skeleton’s skull, taunting us. A little prairie Lord of the Flies.

No adult intervened. There was no scolding about offering indignity to human remains. Dad was largely absent, and I think our mother was just really tired of her third and fourth go-round of raising teenagers. It was easier to ignore us as long as we stayed outside and didn’t alarm the neighbours.

That Halloween, my brother and I agreed to a short détente to set Claude up in the front hall. We wedged a cigarette in his fingers and wired a green light into his skull. We were thrilled by our work—a skeleton languishing with an after-dinner smoke and electrified skull in our front hall! Each time we opened the door to hand out candy, we were rewarded by the shudders Claude produced in the trick-or-treating little ghouls.

I have dined out many times on the story of my family’s skeleton. Granted, it’s rich material. But by the time I was ready to question Claude’s provenance and the ethics of owning human bones, my parents were both dead.

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From  talking to others in the family, here’s what I’ve pieced together: Dad bought the skeleton in London sometime in the 1920s when he was a medical student and then a surgical resident at the London Hospital. In 1941, he joined the British Army Medical Corps and was sent to hospitals in Palestine, Libya and, finally, to Malta where he treated casualties from the Italian campaign of World War II.

Mom moved out of London during the Blitz, then there were several more moves during the war in England with my two little sisters. When Dad was demobilized in 1945, they emigrated to Durban, South Africa. Then in the late 1950s, we emigrated to Canada. We were a bigger family on the move now—my brother and I born after the war in Durban, my second oldest sister, her new husband, and her baby daughter in utero. Somehow, during all those moves, Claude came along too: across the Atlantic by ship, across Canada by rail to Alberta, two moves in that province, then by truck to Denman Island, British Columbia, where Mom finally convinced Dad in 1976 to retire from his overworked family medicine practice in Alberta.

Mom was radiantly happy that summer. At sixty-six, she was full of life. She relished setting up a new home on a lot overlooking a beautiful little bay where a pair of blue herons nested. One of my most joyful memories is hearing her whoops from the deck as she dodged hummingbirds dive-bombing her, mistaking the huge blossoms on her caftan for the real thing.

On a sunny day in early September, she was picnicking on a nearby beach with Dad and old friends. Mom waded into the ocean in her flamboyant caftan and called back that the water was warm, that everyone should come in. Suddenly, she was face down in the water. People immediately responded to get her onto the beach, make sure her heart was pumping and her breathing restored. A pontooned seaplane ambulance from the main island was quickly summoned. Relieved and convinced they were in the clear, Dad sat up front with the pilot, but by the time they arrived at the hospital, Mom was gone.

Somehow, even in my stunned grief, I knew it was a good death. Mom was terrified of losing autonomy, of being dependent, a burden. With Dad and my siblings, the ritual of scooping handfuls of her ashes and bone fragments and throwing them out to sea felt achingly, intimately right.

After the funeral, I stayed with Dad for a month, both of us dazed and grieving. One day, I crawled into the gravelled storage space under the house, crammed with lawn chairs, gardening tools, and boxes—then, deep at the back, a battered, corroded metal trunk. Bent over in the dark, claustrophobic crawl space, I jimmied open the trunk’s latch and wrestled the lid up. And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, for the second memorable time, I came face-to-skull with Claude, the shock of his eyeless gaze and gaping mouth undiminished.

This time, no one came running when I screamed.

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After my mom died, Dad remarried fairly quickly and rashly decided to emigrate back to Durban. It was 1982; South Africa was firmly locked in apartheid. Mandela was in jail. We were boycotting South African wine and oranges. I was married with a four-year-old daughter. I begged Dad to come to his senses and stay, conscious of our roles reversed—me, the adult voice of reason; Dad, the stubborn, headstrong teenager. He didn’t listen to me. So Claude was hefted onto a shipping container for yet another trip across the Atlantic.

A few months after they arrived in Durban, Dad and his new wife decided they couldn’t hack the heat and the politics and decamped back to Alberta, leaving my poor sister in Johannesburg to sort out his belongings, including what to do with the skeleton. She wisely arranged to donate it to a teaching hospital in Natal, South Africa.

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When I was teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, my students and I became interested in the law surrounding Dr. Victor’s Frankenstein’s acquisition of human bodies to build a creature he believed he could animate, thus defeating death. We learned that in 1818, when young Mary had the famous nightmare that inspired her novel, corpses were not considered to have legal rights. Grave robbing to supply the growing demand from medical schools was common, through there was widespread public outrage at the grisly practice, and cemeteries began to install gates and fences to protect the dead. This led to “Resurrectionists” or body snatchers, like young Victor Frankenstein, who raided graves and charnel houses. Students’ internet searches turned up records of criminal trials in the 1800s revealing that gangs kidnapped and murdered people for an underground black-market trade, a practice that gave rise to the idiom “skeleton in the closet”—referencing a secret so dark it had to be hidden.

After grave robbing and body snatching were finally outlawed in Britain, demand for human skeletons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outstripped what could be supplied legally from the bodies of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses from morgues and hospitals. To supply this demand, the market turned to India, then a British colony.

For over a century, until the trade in human skeletons was outlawed in 1985 by the Indian government, skeletons exported to the West came from villages in India, with no hard questions asked of their provenance by Western buyers.

This nefarious bone trade, a business that made millions for several generations of Calcutta-based skeleton merchant families, relied on the corpses of the so-called Untouchables or Dalits, those at the very bottom of India’s ancient caste system. People from this subordinate caste were traditionally pressed into clearing human waste and collecting bones after cremations. It seems likely that they were also pressed into retrieving and processing unclaimed bodies, most likely from the same caste, for export to the West to supply the growing market for human skeletons.

Years after Suzann and I were cultivating our gothic coolness and my brother and I were playing around with Claude’s bones, I came to the unsettling realization that his body was most likely one of thousands of human bodies considered by Indian suppliers and Western consumers to be a legitimate “natural resource,” sourced from a colony with a huge population of humans to supply skeletons to customers like my dad, who had the money to pay and who asked no uncomfortable questions about their provenance.

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In the four terms that I taught Frankenstein, I had my students put Dr. Victor Frankenstein on trial for crimes against humanity. I chose articulate students to act as defense and prosecution attorneys, then assigned the novel’s characters to individual students to prepare depositions and be examined and cross-examined by the attorneys. The rest of the class acted as jury.

Of the four classes who acted out this trial, three juries found the young doctor guilty, both for playing God in making the creature, and then for abandoning him.

Only one student jury declared the doctor not guilty, convinced by the argument that even though Dr. Frankenstein’s project was a moral failure, the knowledge gained from the experiment added to the body of scientific knowledge of the day. A lot of science is like that, the young prosecutor argued. The end justifies the means. Even when experiments fail, they still provide useful knowledge.

I thought of these trials when my brother reminded me recently of a letter we found after our dad died. It was from a British soldier whose facial wounds Dad had treated in WWII. The soldier wrote, “God gave me my first face. You gave me my second.”

I imagine my young dad in medical school carefully feeling his way around the skull of his acquired skeleton, learning to differentiate each of the twenty-two bones of the neurocranium, the bone case which protects the brain (twenty-two bones!), and then identifying the fourteen bones of the viscerocranium which forms the face. How the intimacy of that bone and muscle memory may have guided him as he carefully, painstakingly reconstructed that soldier’s shattered face.

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A lot has happened in the five decades since I first encountered that human skeleton in the basement of my family home. My bones have become more fragile as I age. Over the past ten years, I’ve broken a finger bone, an ankle bone, and my left humerus, which required me to sleep sitting up for six long weeks. I was not a patient invalid.

My own mortality casts a longer shadow now as the list of my dead has grown: parents, in-laws, eldest sister, youngest brother, close friends, children of close friends.

When my family made the collective decision to take my youngest brother off life support as a result of massive brain injury caused by a stroke, we learned that in order to donate one’s body for medical research in our province, you have to register with the university’s Anatomical Gifts Program before your death. He had not done that. We scrambled in the fog of grief to honor his wishes for a green burial—no embalming, plain pine coffin, dust to dust. Luck led us to buy a grave plot for $200 in a little country cemetery overlooking the eastern slopes of the Rockies in central Alberta near where we grew up. Plans were falling into place, but when the funeral people called asking for a burial suit, we lost our composure. Who or what did they imagine he was being dressed up for? Still, we couldn’t stomach putting him in the coffin naked, so my husband and I went to Fabricland where we found some finely woven unbleached linen—perfect for a shroud.

How much? asked the salesperson.

No idea.

So, while Mark turned in slow circles, I unspooled linen and draped it around his body. Six yards. More than enough for an adult human shroud. Measuring my brother’s shroud around my husband’s body—well, that was an intimate experience.

After the funeral, we felt the urgency to reckon more practically with our own end-of-life decisions. We updated our wills. We filled out forms at the provincial organ and tissue donation registry. We’d always thought we’d opt for cremation, but learned that burning a body produces the carbon equivalent of two tanks of gas. That’s not huge in itself, but when multiplied by the overall toxicity from burning many millions of bodies globally, plus all the harmful mercury that’s vaporized from fillings in our teeth, we began exploring other more eco-friendly options. Although it’s not yet fully commercially feasible, I’m drawn to being buried in a suit or coffin infused with mushroom spores—fungi that will not only purify my body’s toxins as it decomposes, but also nourish the earth as it turns to compost.

I realize that having a range of choices about what happens to my body after I die is a privilege. More people than ever before in history have been forced from their homes through climate catastrophe, persecution, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide. More people than ever die unnatural deaths in dire circumstances.

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My parents’ unwillingness to live under apartheid was why we left South Africa to emigrate to Canada in the late 1950s. I’ve learned that South Africa’s apartheid system, particularly the creation of “homelands” to separate Black people from the white minority, was allegedly modeled on Canada’s system of native reserves.

The Canadian government’s approach to address the legacy of colonial trauma through a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was designed in part on South Africa’s model—another of history’s strange reciprocities. Hundreds of Indigenous people across the country told the TRC stories of being forcibly taken from their families and sent to church-run residential schools where their hair was cut and they were forbidden to speak their languages, wear traditional clothing, or engage in their cultural practices. The TRC report, released in 2015, estimated that over four thousand Indigenous children had died in residential schools from disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse, but it is almost certain there are more unrecorded deaths. In many instances, parents were never told of their children’s deaths, or if or where they had been buried.

In May 2021, ground-penetrating radar located what were thought to be the unmarked graves of over two hundred children at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Under cover of night and armed with shovels, some denialists were caught trying to dig up the ground around the former school—apparently attempting to debunk the allegations that Indigenous children were buried there in mass graves. These people wanted to prove no skeletons exist, but for me this was an eerie resonance with nineteenth-century grave robbers digging for skeletons to sell for profit.

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When our eldest daughter turned forty, she asked for a skeleton for her birthday. Not a real one—that skeleton in our family had long since sailed.

Still, I was curious. I found that it is still possible to legally buy a real human skeleton in North America. One source is a company called JonsBones in Brooklyn, whose website insists that the bones they sell are ethically sourced from retired doctors like my dad or their descendants, and from med schools, biology labs, and art colleges. There’s no mention of where or how these bones might have been acquired before that. The site advertises a rare articulated human skeleton for $7,000 US. The skeleton dates from the 1920s, around the time Dad bought Claude. JonsBones also sells spines, hands, feet, skulls, and even a second trimester fetal skull for $3,800 US.

In the “Our Story” introduction to the company’s impressive website, I learned that the company’s millennial founder, Jon Ferry, has a vocational zeal to “destigmatize human osteology,” a passion born in childhood in Indonesia when he was fascinated by a mouse skeleton. Educational tours can be booked to the company’s Bone Museum in Brooklyn where human spines are arranged in rows and skulls line shelves in glass cases. Jon, who wears his dark hair long and generally favours black t-shirts and skinny jeans, creates TikTok videos showcasing his bone business, some of which feature his cat, very much alive.

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It doesn’t surprise me that at fifteen I didn’t question where Claude came from, who he might have been before he came into my dad’s possession, or if he had any say about his bones being used for medical research. My hunch is that he did not. And yes, my dad did benefit from his close anatomical study of these bones, a study that helped develop his skill as a physician and surgeon. Thinking about the student prosecutor’s argument that Dr. Frankenstein’s failed experiment added to the sum of scientific knowledge, the argument could be made for a zero-sum game where the overall losses and gains balance out. But history is not a zero-sum game. Those with power and privilege have and will continue to gain more than those without.

Writing this, I quite often found myself typing “owe” instead of “own.” That typo turned out to be a kind of illuminating Freudian slip. I found that owe and own not only sound like close cousins, but they also share a root in the Old English āgan: to possess—a root that branches into notions of “ought”—a sense that ownership comes with  obligation. At this stage of life, I still carry the commitment I fiercely held as a young woman of the right to own my body and my right to make decisions about it. But my sense of ownership now carries a greater sense of obligation to care for this body that has served me so well throughout my life.

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We ended up buying an articulated female skeleton made of PVC material for around $200 and presented it to our daughter at her fortieth birthday party. She named the skeleton Claudette and invited us to claim particular bones and fix tags with our names on these bones.

Mother now to two children, our eldest chose the pelvis. Middle daughter, a nurse, chose the xiphoid process, the cartilage tag that juts down from the sternum. You can easily feel it in the centre of your chest. Why the xiphoid process? Because, she explained, it’s a body mark for administering CPR, but other than that it has no skeletal function. “It’s decorative,” she said, “and dramatic. I love that about it.” My husband chose the vertebrae at the top of the spine—C3 through C7—the site of a spinal stenosis operation four years prior, surgery made urgent because the vertebrae were pressing on the nerve, causing excruciating pain. I chose the sacrum, the sitting bone as my yoga teacher called it, a grounding bone. Youngest daughter tagged the skeleton’s ear cavity, signalling  her choice of the tiny bones of the middle ear, too small to be preserved in the skeleton, but crucial for transmitting sound waves. They are the auditory ossicles formally labelled the malleus, incus, and stapes, but better known by what they resemble: the hammer, anvil, and stirrup.

Claudette is now installed in a corner of our daughter’s living room, though periodically she’s moved into the family bathroom to remind the teenagers to straighten up, stop slouching. Claudette holds court next to the ofrenda, an altar our daughter has created to hold photos of our ancestors and other memorabilia, a Day of the Dead tradition in Mexico where her partner was born.

On Halloween night—the beginning of Allhallowtide, the season of remembrance for the dead—she lights candles there to remember the continued presence of our ancestors, our personal dead, in our lives. Memento mori.

It’s a tradition I’d like to copy. Next Halloween, I will create my own ofrenda. I’ll light candles in memory of all the dead—the unnamed and named, the unknown and known. My small act of acknowledgement.

Jannie Stafford Edwards is a poet, essayist, and teacher who writes from Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on Treaty 6 / Métis Region #4 lands, where the coyotes and magpies are becoming bolder. She has published three collections of poetry, and most recently two limited edition chapbooks: Blues for a Rare Moon (2023) and Learning Their Names: Letters from the Home Place (2022), poetic letters exchanged across the country with artist Sydney Lancaster during a pandemic year that explore relationship with a beloved five-acre homestead near the North Saskatchewan River. In the videopoem, engrams: reach and seize memory, Jannie’s English poetry is translated into American Sign Language and performed by Deaf actor and translator Linda Cundy. www.jannieedwards.ca.