It isn’t uncommon for people to hold on to keepsakes from loved ones who have passed away in order to remember and feel close to them. Some cultures, take this idea a step further by literally keeping pieces of the deceased:
In some cultures, the physical remains of a loved one is intended to comfort the bereaved. New Zealanders embalmed the heads of family members by removing the brains, stuffing the cavities with flowers, baking them in the oven and drying them out in the sun. The relics were kept in baskets, scented with oil, and brought out on special occasions during which their relatives would cry over them. (source)
There are some fairly mainstream examples of this kind of keeping of the dead, from some unexpected places. When Mary Shelley died, the heart of her deceased husband Percy Bysshe Shelley was found in her desk wrapped in a silk handkerchief. He died nearly thirty years before her. Sir Walter Raleigh‘s widow had his head embalmed after his execution, which she kept until her own death many years later.
Though there are different motivations behind it, more recently, the preservation of human bodies has seen a resurgence in traveling exhibitions like Body Worlds, which showcases human bodies stripped of their skin and preserved using a process called plastination. Another exhibition called Bodies infers something darker about the origins of some of these corpses. The exhibition contains “21 preserved human cadavers, along with 250 organs and partial-body specimens,” all of which are Chinese homeless citizens who, sadly, had no one to claim or bury them after they died.
If anything is macabre about our ongoing history with the dead, it must be this more recent disregard for the nameless, unloved and unclaimed rather than the desire of earlier people to keep their dear ones close.
Bleeding Hollow Heart by Skesis.
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