The left overs
Some of the wacky ways dead bodies were disposed of — or kept
In his new book, “The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains” (Princeton University Press) history professor Thomas W. Laqueur examines how different cultures handle the remains of their loved ones. He shares with The Post some of the funny, strange and touching things to do with the ashes of the dead.
In rural Virginia, a hunter I knew told me that he and his buddies took some of the ashes of a dead friend, loaded them in the black powder shells that he had made and shot them into the forest air. The rest they put on a salt lick near their hunting cabin so that the ashes could be ingested by the deer they might kill and eat some time in the future.
One woman told me that her grandmother’s ashes colored in the ink that she used for her tattoos.
Another woman told me that she had divorced her former husband in large part because he was more interested in sex with himself than with her. She was with him when he died and has put his ashes next to a jar of Vaseline in her bathroom.
The family of a professional photographer put his ashes into 35 mmfilm cartridges and buried these in the various places all over the world where he had worked.
The wife — also his sister — of the fourth century BCE King Mausolus of Halicarnassus loved him so much that not only did she build him a great tomb — the first mausoleum and a wonder of the ancient world — but also ingested some of his ashes so that he would live within her.
In 1832, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, gave his body to science and was, as he had wished, dissected in the company of his friends. They preserved his skeleton, which they dressed in his clothes. Despite using techniques learned from the Maori they failed to preserve his head and so made a wax model, which they crowned with his real hair. University College London, which he had helped found, got this autoicon in 1850. It still oc casionally attends meetings.
The first Tudor King, Henry VII, left £250 when he died in 1509, the equivalent of many millions today, to pay monks so they could pray for his soul in perpetuity. Less than 30 years later his son Henry VIII confiscated all such endowments and turned them to secular use.
Karl Marx was exhumed in 1955 and moved from his obscure grave down the hill to the prominent site he now occupies. Foreign as it might seem to Marxist materialism, his tomb is surrounded by the graves of comrades. Archeologists coming upon it centuries from now might think they had discovered a holy site.
Frederick the Great, who died in 1786, coined the phrase “a dog is a man’s best friend” and wanted to be buried with his greyhounds on the grounds of Sans Souci, his summer palace. His royal heirs thought this inappropriate, and his body was buried in Potsdam next to his hated father. Hitler made sure the coffin was safe by hiding it in a salt mine. Finally, in 2005, Frederick got his wish and now lies surrounded by his best friends.
When the Unknown Warrior who was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey on Nov. 11, 1920, no one thought it would become so politically and emotionally powerful. It was the first such shrine. Almost all countries now have one. A brigadier general walked blindfolded around the remains of four soldiers that had been exhumed from the mud and chose one. The others went back to where they had lain.
Diogenes the Cynic, a contemporary of Plato and the man most famous for supposedly going around with a lantern looking for an honest man, asked to have his body tossed over the city walls to be eaten by the birds and the beast. Heraclitus, an earlier Greek philosopher, said that he thought that the best thing to do with dead bodies was to use them to fertilize the fields. No culture has ever followed their advice but advocates of ecoburial today come close.