Tour of Bones (Denise Inge)
OVERVIEW
Tour of Bones describes Denise Inge’s journey to four charnel houses (ossuaries) across Europe. Inge wanted to contemplate her mortality – she wanted to look at herself “without the flesh on,” to sit with the bones until their message of mortality was no longer a fearful one. She visited ossuaries in Czermna, Sedlec, Hallstatt, and Naters, before returning home to the charnel house that sat on her own property. My favourite parts of Tour of Bones were not the recollections, the retellings of the events themselves, but rather Inge’s thoughts on death and mortality – her insights into finitude and life and fear.
Our fear of living
As much as we fear death, we fear life. What Inge thinks scares us about the brevity of life is the fear that we are not truly living, that we may never live the way we should, that we’ll run out of time before we do. We suspect there’s more to life than not dying, but we worry our true lives are hiding somewhere in the unexplored margins. We fill our days with ceaseless activity to escape thinking about death, but in doing so we create such mundanity, such dull uneventfulness, that when we do turn toward our mortality we find our own screaming wastefulness looking back. And on the possibility of an immortal afterlife?
And what good does believing in life after death do if it means you just put off living? If hope is hushed frustration, what good is it? And who would want such hope?
Death denial and the rise of the “self”
Inge expertly details how the rise in individuality, in the “self” (now at the centre of Western society), feeds our death anxiety and death denial. It wasn’t just medical advances and longer lifespans, it was the human identity that shifted from something communal to something independent. “Now we are our bodies and our limit is our skin.” Where once we had communities and causes that allowed us to transcend ourselves, to live on in something bigger, we now have only our little selves. Little comfort because the self is finite and forgettable.
Scattering ashes
Inge wonderfully compares our modern desire to scatter our ashes as evidence of our scattered lives, our social looseness and home-less-ness. Most of us (she’d argue) don’t want our ashes scattered around our homes or neighbourhoods. We don’t feel like we belonged permanently to these places, and they are not profound, worthy of our final resting place. No, we want our ashes scattered by the sea, or on a mountaintop, or at our favourite vacation spot. Not the places we lived, the places we visited. Places we felt most alive. But why don’t we feel like the places we lived were most meaningful?
This seems to me to be marking not where we lived our everyday lives but where we wish we’d lived. . . I can’t help also feeling that the implication of wanting to be scattered somewhere that meant something to us is that the ordinary neighbourhoods of our days had not enough meaning for us. It is as if we have spent a life wishing to be elsewhere, or focused on somewhere we are not. We have lost either the will or the ability to see that where we are is the place of meaning.
Our modern mobility means we prioritize variety over belonging. And where we want our ashes scattered betrays that the most meaningful places are often not the ones we belonged to, that “meaning” wasn’t really where we were, only where we wanted to be.
Green burials
It’s becoming fashionable to have a green burial or a “woodland” burial, returning our bodies to the soil so they can nourish life. Inge thinks that green burials plug into our Western guilt over the abuse of our environment. We see death as a way to make amends, a final contribution after a lifetime of over-indulgence. Our “green salvation is less an expression of spirituality and more like a final consumer choice.” It reveals our longing for nature and deep attachment to the earth, which we spend our lives poisoning and perverting. Only in death do our burial choices divulge how we should have lived, so dissimilar from the way we actually do.
The answers you live
Inge, reflecting on each of the ossuaries she visited, finds each of them asked her a question. Are you healed? Do you have hope? How will you be remembered? Have you found humility? Inge wants to live these questions, questions that reach to the corners of our psyche and never go away. She suggests we live in a way that holds us accountable to big questions, because we speak the answers with our lives.
To be present in a moment is not hard. But it takes all of you. You have to listen well and look long. You have to engage your heart, bringing your fear and your hope to the same place, for what is hope without an element of dread? Unless it teeters at the edge of loss it is a saccharine thing, a Disney wish.
I want to tell the bones what they have given me, but they have no ears to hear and no eyes to see. So I will tell it whole to those who still have flesh on, speaking from my bones to theirs while there is breath to do so and life to live the words out. The beautiful brevity of this life throbs in me like an overgrown heartbeat. It sings in my bones, it lifts my ribs as I stretch high to draw the curtains closed against the night.
The ending to Tour of Bones is especially emotional because it was during the writing that Inge discovered she had terminal cancer. She visited the ossuaries as a meditation on mortality, and then carried the intimateness of that mortality inside her as she wrote. Inge died six months before Tour of Bones was published (but before that, she lived).