I just finished reading a book about the ways in which the corpses of famous people have been treated badly. And they have been treated very badly indeed.

Although I was attracted to it at The Strand bookstore in New York City because it looked like a light read of anecdotes suitable for dipping into, the cumulative effect of reading the whole book was a bit dismaying. As the author says, the “urge to connect with famous people by owning, handling, seeing, or displaying runs throughout history.” Otherwise respectable people extracted fingers, livers, heads, and penises from the bodies of the distinguished, and kept them as mementoes and as amusements. Probably the most seemly was that Mary Shelley held onto Percy’s heart for the rest of her life (though it may have been his liver). Other bodies were dug up and reburied, often repeatedly, often with body parts being taken away as souvenirs during each move.

I was reminded of the classroom where I taught fourth and fifth grade science for ten years in a private school. The science department of the school had always been overly well-funded in comparison to other departments, so my predecessors had been able to buy a lot of supplies you wouldn’t normally find in an elementary school. Glassware and expensive microscopes. Many, many preserved animals. Bottles of reagents, including nitric acid. Samples of many elements, some poisonous. And a full-sized human skeleton suspended dangling from a screw-eye in his skull, from an upright steel rod, mounted on a wooden stand with rolling wheels. The children called him “Mr. Bones.”

As someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and as the daughter of a microbiologist, I was never dismayed by dead things. They surrounded us. We squashed bugs without compunction. There is a photo of me as an infant on a leopard’s skin, with its head stuffed and snarling. My mother got me to help anesthetize crickets for the Bryn Mawr biology class she was teaching, and for a long time she had a dissected cat splayed out in a wax-filled tray on her counter in her own lab. I owned a fox-tail, though never a coonskin cap (and I wanted one badly).

Skeletons seemed downright seemly to me, especially Mr. Bones. I didn’t know his provenance, but I assumed someone had sold their body or their relative’s after death, possibly in an impoverished country. One day when I was teaching about vertebrate animals, I hopped up on the wooden stand and stood next to him, and invited the students to tell me what they noticed.

“He’s shorter than you,” one of them said finally, in horror.

“Yes,” I said. “He is very short, possibly a malnourished adult, maybe even a young person” and suddenly it occurred to the kids that the skeleton had been part of an actual human being once. They had never really made the connection.

I have no idea what fool thought it a great idea to buy that thing. But they had money in that department once, though when I joined the school they were living in hard times and the heat was turned off over the weekend to save money.

Later in my career there, the science department had to arrange for a hazmat cleanup of the storage room in the high school, which was even more full of unidentified chemicals and strange devices. I think they had to deal with the government at one point. My own lab (a peeling basement room, in a building that had seen far better days) wasn’t nearly the same level of danger. I transferred to the middle school and began teaching English the year they renovated the elementary school, so I don’t know what happened to Mr. Bones.

I have become somewhat more squeamish as I age, and I am less easy with the idea of that skeleton. I am genuinely horrified by the traveling exhibit of plastinated human beings that travels the world. People donate their bodies to be preserved forever in all kinds of preposterous postures, but without their skins, and it seems indecent and disrespectful to me, in a way that ordinary nakedness does not.

When my in-laws died, they also donated their bodies to science, which generally but not always involves dissection in medical school. Their cremated remains were returned to the family eventually for nice memorial services, but as I read this book I was reminded that their elderly corpses probably had young people rummaging around in them.

My dad donated his body as well, in keeping with his absolute rejection of any kind of belief in religion, the afterlife, or consideration for others, and his genuine concern with not spending any money. He didn’t want his body to be returned.

My mother, however, was an Episcopal priest and died on Christmas Day. After being stored at the funeral director’s for a bit, she was cremated and her ashes strewn over the property she used to own and that her mother owned before her. It was a family vision, that property, a thick woods with a pasture and a stream, a place we called The Green Forest, so I guess it made sense to everyone. But she wasn’t actually wandering those woods, and they didn’t even belong to her any more. It was just her ashes that ended up on someone else’s land. Though I had been my mother’s local daughter and part-time caregiver, I didn’t go with my family members to spread the ashes. That container wasn’t my mother any more.

My husband was also cremated, three years ago after he died of cancer. I was thinking of that when I was reading the book. He wanted a proper burial and a grave, and I bought a plot for him while he was near the end, and showed him a picture of the spot, which consoled him. We had a nice service for his small box of bones and ash, conducted by the rector of his favorite church (who resigned his post not long after in disgrace after having a romantic attachment to a parishioner, but I digress; nice man, who visited my husband and didn’t react when my husband refused Communion). I visit my husband’s grave once a month, but not because I think he’s there. I do it because I told him I would.

Well, I confess I sort of think he’s there. I catch him up on current events when I visit, and I leave him some flowers, then catch the bus home.

When I was in New York City this week, I found myself wanting to call my husband and tell him about the rain we were having. I think when I stop wanting to tell him things, I will really, truly know there’s nothing in that grave except a little cardboard box of ashes in a small concrete box, but for now, my visits are the only way I can keep him up on current events. But I have very few souvenirs of him in my house, and especially no spare body parts.

I sit here at my keyboard, with all my fingers intact and my head atop my neck where it currently belongs, and I admit that I find human beings very peculiar.

Merry Christmas.