All That Remains: A Life in Death

by Sue Black

there is no comfort to be had from soft words spoken at a safe distance.

‘Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’

The four permanent cell types are the neurons in our nervous system, a tiny little area of bone at the base of our skull called the otic capsule, the enamel in our teeth and the lenses in our eyes.

The nutrient building blocks required to construct our otic capsule were supplied by Mum from what she was eating around sixteen weeks into her pregnancy. So within our head, in that minute piece of bone just big enough to hold four raindrops, we will perhaps carry for the rest of our lives the elemental signature of what our mother had for lunch when she was four months pregnant. Proof, if any were needed, that our mums never leave us, and a whole new perspective on the mystery of how they manage to get inside our heads.

So we could, in theory, look at the remains of an individual and, from the isotopic signatures in the otic capsule and first molar, discover where in the world their mother was living when she was pregnant with them and the nature of her diet. We could then analyse the remainder of the adult teeth to establish where the deceased person had grown up, and then the rest of their bones to determine where they had lived for the past fifteen years or so. Finally, we could use their hair and nails to locate where they spent the last years or months of their life.

I realised that day that when the animation of the person we were is stripped out of the vessel we have used to pilot our way through life, it leaves little more than an echo or a shadow in the physical world.

As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: ‘Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.’

The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn’t something we ‘get over’, and it doesn’t necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

We can predict the adult height of a child either by doubling their stature at the age of two (isn’t it incredible that we grow to half our full adult height within our first two years?) or by calculating what is called MPH (mid-parental height). For a boy, in centimetres, the equation is: father’s height + mother’s height + 13 ÷ 2; for a girl: father’s height – 13 + mother’s height ÷ 2.

As the Roman philosopher Seneca said: ‘The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.’