The Unquiet Bones

by Loreth Anne White

“Our bones are the last of us to go, and even hundreds of years later they can still tell us so much about who someone was, how they lived, and in some cases, even how they died. Just like the lines in tree trunks, our lives are written into our bones. And if you know how to read them”—she glances at her students—“they speak. They tell us whether someone was healthy, muscled, strong, frail, ill. They reveal whether a person was a pescatarian, vegetarian, omnivore, carnivore, and if they were breastfed and exactly when breastfeeding stopped. They tell us if someone was abused, injured in the past, where they lived, and occasionally, what their profession was and how their life ended.”

Within about three hours of rising, our cartilage settles and compresses and decreases our joint spaces. We end up shorter at the end of the day than when we started.

Shady Ferns Assisted Living Care facility

the media—a bunch of clickbait cowboys—

His job showed me that villains are more often than not very ordinary people who, for whatever reason, end up doing a bad thing. They’re seldom twirling mustaches, wearing black hats, and scheming to take over the world with clever cat and mouse mind games. They’re your neighbor, some kid’s father, your friend from school, your boss, your boyfriend, the guy who works at the garage, the mailman, a schoolteacher. Sometimes good people just do very bad things.”

The need to belong is a basic survival instinct more powerful than logic. Biologically it can override the most rational of thinking.

To be cut out of the herd represents danger on some unconscious biological level that drove her teen brain. It’s how people get sucked into cults and become progressively more isolated from outside influences. That’s what happened with their group of six.

The things we do, for our children—to keep them safe, to atone for our own childhood sins, when inside our aging bodies we’re all really just still frightened and bullied children ourselves . . .

“Emotion is not weakness, Jane. Empathy is not soft. It’s what makes us most human. Most strong.”