Inspiration from the Dead
For the last month I ran an adventure titled Ossuary Music. It’s fun and fictional, but as with all stories, there are seeds of reality woven into the fabric of the story. If it carried a creepier feel than most of my adventures, that’s the ghost of my experience bleeding through.
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to walk through the Catacombs in Paris. Those tunnels don’t need wendigos or ghosts to bring chills. Millions of people are buried there. The empty eye sockets of so many skulls demanded a quiet reverence that every breathing person felt. It spoke in the scuff of our feet and the hushed murmur of our voices. I learned as I walked that this was the burial of the poor. In the past, only the rich received their own graves. The poor received mass burials. And I wondered what their stories were. Who were these people holding up the city? How did they live? Would they even recognize the city above them?
They ended up in this final resting place for two reasons. One was because the Paris cemeteries were overflowing, causing not only a stink, but also a major health issue. The largest cemetery in Paris housed over 2 million bodies alone.
The other reason came from the infrastructure of Paris itself. The city is built primarily from limestone mined from below it. After a while, too much limestone had been removed and the city started sinking. So, they filled in the tunnels with waste rock from the mining process and with bones.
It struck me as sad that these people don’t even have head stones. That we know next to nothing about them. Maybe the message they pass on to the living is an honor in and of itself. A reminder of where we’ve been and that, beneath all the trappings of life, we all eventually come to rest as just bones.
Some might find that morbid. I find it humbling and motivating. There’s a story of a monk who kept a real skull on his desk as a reminder of how fleeting our time on earth is. It gives perspective to all we do. For those of us who believe in God and scripture, we don’t view those bones as the last act. It’s only the changing of the page. But this act right now has purpose. And as I said about the monk, in perspective, our chance to fulfill that purpose is now.
And I digress. I could run down that rabbit trail a lot farther, but I won’t.
To honor the poor of the Catacombs, the “you” in the adventure last month is a street urchin. I originally began writing the story as though you entered the ossuary to play music for a recently past friend but, when I started writing that, things became too heavy and dark. So, I kept the poor aspect overall but changed the purpose to something a little less gloomy.
The other seed that got woven into the adventure comes from a story of an illegal concert carried out amidst the bones in 1897. A group of amateur musicians snuck into the tunnels and played music such as Chopin’s Funeral March and Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre. The bones are eerie enough, but the idea of classical music carrying through the tunnels for miles…yup, chills.
As I think about all this, maybe the final earthly resting place for these millions of people isn’t so terrible after all. They fascinate people, presenting perspective, inspiration, and a touch of reality rarely seen. They offer something to millions of the living that a single headstone doesn’t. It’s a legacy spanning hundreds of years. Although we don’t know individual names, we know life is precious because of their exposed faces and eerie countenances.
When my page turns, I can only hope for a fraction of that kind of legacy, but even if it’s just that the adventures help people enjoy reading, or that my musings encourage people to consider that there might be more beyond this life, that’s enough.
Is yours enough?
Blessings,
Jennifer
The Unbelievable Story of the Paris Catacombs – I don’t always remember specifics well. This site was wonderful for refreshing my memory if you’re interested 
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