At our house, there are no skeletons in the closet. All our skeletons — well, all the decorative ones — are outside, zip-tied to the trees, holding up the mailbox, and popping up between dead sunflower stalks. We are officially One Of Those Skeleton Houses, and they are there year-round, not just during Halloween.
This is hardly an edgy aesthetic these days. Lots of people set up elaborate skeleton displays at this time of year, investing hundreds of dollars in the deluxe 12-foot ones that loom over suburban streets. Lots of people never take their skeletons down and simply add Santa hats or Valentine hearts or Easter bunny ears, as the season demands.
But I’m different. I have a unique personal reason for keeping my skeletons up all the time, and it is this: I like skeletons. I always have. I think they are beautiful, charming and fascinating, tragic and dear. I also have a painting of a skull on our family altar and a painted, tin-winged skeleton Sacred Heart in the dining room, and I’m working on carving a melancholy little skull out of scrap cedar for my cold weather hobby. In elementary school, I obsessively drew skeletons dancing, climbing ladders and raking leaves. In college, I startled the chef by running a load of leftover ham hocks through the industrial dishwasher because I wanted to sketch those elegant bony curves and undulations. I just like skeletons! I think they’re neat.
Sitting patiently
For a while, I tried to persuade myself that this was a good old Catholic memento mori-type fascination. I was keeping all these skulls around as a reminder of my mortality, just like St. Francis or St. Jerome. Do all your work and live all your life as if it’s your last day on earth because you never know: It might be. Make your peace with death while you still have the choice, because it’s coming either way.
I wish this were my motivation, but it’s not. The last time death came to collect someone I cared about, I fell to pieces, as if no one had ever died before, and this was some new, monstrous means of torture designed specifically to make me, in particular, unhappy.
So I can’t claim to be particularly comfortable with death. Instead, I have made my peace with a related concept: not the fleetness of life, but the perseverance of the living, even after death. The tenacity, the sheer, dogged refusal of the human body to go completely away.
The German word sitzfleisch, which translates, as you might guess, “sitting flesh,” means the kind of single-minded persistence you need to, well, sit on your bum until you get the job done. And, in fact, sitzfleisch also means your bodily bottom, your “sit meat.”
Sometimes, it means not so much the meat you park in the chair as the patience you will need to sit in one spot until things resolve themselves, no matter how long it takes.
I cannot ‘not’ be
So here we arrive back at skeletons. There is nothing more patient than a skeleton. Osteogenesis, the process of growing bones, begins in the first few weeks after conception. Tiny little skeleton, bitty little pretty bones, raring to go, gratefully, eagerly borrowing calcium from the mother’s bones and teeth, with no intention of giving it back. Single-mindedly intent on adding to itself and not collapsing back into nothingness, while the mother, knowing or unknowing, steadfastly releases herself into building someone else.
This, too, is sitzfleisch, as I have learned: letting things be taken from you because that’s how life goes on. We fall to pieces, and someone gathers those pieces up and makes something new of them. There is no gain without loss, somewhere. It’s a wonderful and terrible thing, and 10 children later, I have loose and pitted teeth to show that I know what I’m talking about. Bones don’t come out of nowhere.
They don’t go into nowhere, either. Once they’re here, they’re here for a good long time. Depending on conditions, a human skeleton may last 20 years, or a hundred years, or it may just decide it’s not leaving at all and turn into stone. There’s sitzfleisch for you.
That’s what skeletons say: I was here, and I am here, still. Now that I am here, I cannot “not” be.
Some people remind themselves of each other’s humanity by remembering that we are all children of God and that we were all babies once. Every single human starts fresh and innocent and worthy of love, and we can keep ourselves in charity by remembering how that lovable person is still inside somewhere, no matter what disguise they’ve taken on over the years through hardship and sin.
I find it more helpful to look even deeper and remember the skeleton inside. Remember the raceless, ageless, elegant curves and undulations, and the patience therein. There is a brotherhood of bones, and it’s all sitz, no fleisch.
All their weary flesh is gone; all the blemishes and bulges, sags, hairs and burns, scars and calluses, tendons and muscles firm or weak, blown-out veins and hanging skin, birthmarks and birthrights are all gone. A paleontologist could tell the difference between the bones of a rich man and the bones of a homeless wretch, but I can’t. They are all the same, gaunt, smiling brethren with nothing to hide, no way to hide it. Nothing but patience remains. Undeniably kin at last.
And that’s why I like skeletons. They’re not a memento mori, a remembrance that we must die. Instead, they say memento vivere: “Remember that you will live.”
Now that I am here, I cannot “not” be. You made me, Lord. Now you tell me what’s next.
