Aerial Circus

Will She or Won’t She?

wwnorton:

I don’t teach anatomy, but I understand the impulse. Some months back, I gave thought to becoming a skeleton in a medical school classroom. Years ago I read a Ray Bradbury story about a man who becomes obsessed with his skeleton. He has come to think of it as a sentient, sinister entity that lives inside him, biding its time until he dies and the bones slowly prevail. I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see. I didn’t see it becoming my usurper, but more my stand-in, my means to earthly immortality. I’ve enjoyed hanging around in rooms doing nothing much, and look, I get to do it after I die. Plus, on the off chance that an afterlife exists, and that it includes the option of home planet visitation, I’d be able to pop by the med school and finally see what my bones looked like. I was gone, my skeleton would live on in some sunny, boisterous anatomy classroom. I wanted to be a mystery in some future medical student’s head: Who was this woman? What did she do? How did she come to be here?”

—Mary Roach, from Stiff