Map to 'My Guys'

View Royal Oak Burial Park Sections B and G in a larger map Here is the Google map we created of some of the military burials in Royal Oak Burial Park. If you want to visit my guys you can check out where they reside in Section B of the park. You Can also find links to all the photographs that featured in my last post.

I will remember you

As part of a class project we were required to conduct data collection in a cemetery. I admit as I drove to the cemetery on the day we had selected for our fieldwork I was all business; get in get out approach. I had a ton of school work to get done that weekend and I wanted to get the fieldwork done quickly so I could get started on the essay portion of the project. As our group trudged into the cemetery, notebooks and cameras in hand, there was a distinct feeling of uneasiness that settled over us. I felt that I was somehow trespassing on the people buried there, that somehow, because I did not know them I had no right to be there. As we walked past the crematorium my uneasiness increased especially as I looked at the thick chimneys sticking up at the back of the building. It`s strange the way cemeteries affect us. I do not consider myself to be a particularly religious or superstitious person but I was acutely aware that I had crossed some form of boundary by entering the cemetery and was now in a space where the boundary between the living and the dead was blurred.

 As we began our data recording, issues of ethics were foremost in my mind. I felt uncomfortable crouched over a grave with my notebook, again with a feeling that I was trespassing. I felt that by recording information about the grave marker, I was somehow reducing a human life filled with emotions and experiences to a couple of rows and columns on a wrinkled piece of paper. As I progressed through my recording however I began to feel less intrusive and more attached to the individuals whose graves I was reading. While at the beginning I felt it was sad that a human life could be reduced to a chunk of stone with some words scrawled on it, as time passed I began to feel the magnitude of their (the gravestones) presence. These markers were much more than stone and words. Despite the limited amount of information displayed on their graves I felt a connection to the individuals buried there. One of ‘my guys’ as I began to call them died on December 25^th 1950 and I found I was struck by an overwhelming sadness at the idea of dying on Christmas day. Then I felt bad for feeling preferential sadness to someone because he died on Christmas, as if that was somehow worse than dying any other day of the year.

As we wrapped up our fieldwork and headed home to warm up I felt emotionally drained. Instead of getting right to work I needed to recharge. I went to the beach with a friend to watch his dog race up and down the beach exuding joy and vitality and life. Our trip to the cemetery turned out to be so much more than just scholarly data collection as I had anticipated but ended up being a thoroughly emotional experience. Even as I began analyzing the collected data looking for patterns in monument styles it was no longer ‘strictly business’. I had forged an emotional connection with the individuals whose graves I visited. I felt protective of them. It had somehow become my responsibility to make sure they were not forgotten. And isn’t that really the point of grave markers, to make sure when we die we don’t just cease to exist? Even if our body decomposes into nothing there is still some tangible marker of our lives, that we are remembered. Well if that is the case ‘my guys’ can rest in peace because I will remember them. 

  All photogrpahs were taken by me on February 10th 2013 at Royal Oak Burial Park, Section B.You can visit the Google map we created of some of the military burials in the park. On the map you can also find links to all the photographs that feature in this post. If you want to visit 'my guys' you can check out where they reside in Section B of the park.

Where is your line?

This week we have been learning about mummies!!! Mummies are an interesting and controversial subject that has captured the imaginations of people everywhere. They stir up strong responses; fear, awe, disgust, fascination? For me they bring issues of ethics to the forefront because they force us to confront how we conceptualize bodies as human or object or maybe even somewhere in between. They bring us face to face with death in ways that less fleshy remains perhaps do not.

I like bones. Bones appear to be hard, unchanging objects and I think we often conceptualize of them as objects because we do not usually witness the dynamic nature of live bone but only the static state of dry-bones. Last semester I took human osteology and I found, for the most part, that I did not have a problem dealing with human remains in this way. It was in an educational environment emphasizing the importance of bodies for anatomical learning and scientific pursuit. Even the fetal or young skeletal remains did not evoke a large reaction for me. It wasn’t until I was studying carpals (wrist bones) one day that I really got the heebie-jeebies that fleshy remains give me from the get go. I was sorting through a bag of random carpal bones identifying them and when I was done I had eight of one type, six of those from one side of the body. That’s when it hit me. I had a small handful of bones each one no bigger than a cm long and they represented the remains of six people. Could I really be holding the remains of six human lives in one hand? Could a human life filled with laughter and tears, hardships and victories really boil down to a centimeter long chunk of bone? That was the moment for me when these clean, dry, dis-articulated teaching bones made the shift in my mind from object to person.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t conceptualize human remains as human. When faced with a full skeleton I would clearly identify it as a person and I would be eager to study their bones not so much because I find bones themselves a remarkable tissue, which I certainly do,  but because I would want to bring them back to life, to know their story. As less and less of a complete body is present however I think it is easier and easier to see objects rather than people. Unless confronted with the discomfort of facing the magnitude of dead individuals as I did, it is easy for your brain not to make the connection between a chunk of bone and a living human. Personally I find fleshy bodies such as mummies much harder to conceptually divorce from personhood although certainly not everybody views mummified remains as people rather than objects.

Where is the line for you? Is it mummies? Is it children? Is it the recently deceased? It is an interesting question to consider as it is a very complex and individual process but I think it gets you thinking about how you conceptualize death and how that relates to issues of ethics when dealing with human remains. Hopefully these pictures will stimulate you to consider where you conceptually draw the line between person and object.

 Image References:
1. Lamp (http://store.graciousliving.com/brown-ballister-table-lamp.html), Chinchorro mummy (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/pictures/120813-mummies-chinchorro-proceedings-desert-driest-chile/), John Cleese (http://masticateonthis.blogspot.ca/2010_09_01_archive.html)
2.Tollund Man, Denmark (http://www.mesh5.com/tension/febmarch/tollund1.htm)
3. Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic (http://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/sedlec-ossuary-bone-church-czech-republic/)
4. Bronze Age Wessex, UK (http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/archaeology,ps/Interesting)
5. Rosalia Lombardo (http://www.ticinolive.ch/2013/01/23/rosalia-lombardo-bella-addormentata-nella-catacomba-dei-cappuccini-a-palermo/) 
6. Capuchin Monastery mummies: Palermo, Sicily (http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/countries/crypt-photos/