Strange bones

Although many satirical or reality TV shows will primarily aim at entertaining the audience, they can also be fairly instructive with respect to how we as modern-day people experience and relate to our body. A couple of years ago, I was gripped by an episode of a show in which two female guests shared a quite specific experience with the audience. At one point in their lives, both women had had to face the amputation of parts of their body: one of them needed to have her diseased lower leg removed in hospital and the other woman lost two fingers in an accident.

Amputation, no matter how extreme and traumatic as an experience, is a common phenomenon. The two women had a special story to tell on the show because they held on to their amputated body parts and took them home with them. Normally, people will leave amputated parts behind in hospital, after which these parts will be destroyed in special incinerators. Both women, however, had found out that it was not prohibited to hold on to your own, amputated body parts. The woman who lost two of her fingers had buried them in her backyard and covered them with a stone. The other woman had buried her lower leg and foot in her garden, but after some time she dug them up again – after she was sure only the bones were left. She brought them along with her to the studio, wrapped in nice fabric and at one point she displayed them on the table in front of her. This managed to silence even the talkative show host for a moment.

To the question of why they wanted to hold on to their ‘dead’ limbs the woman who lost two fingers replied that they had been an integral part of her body for very long and that she therefore did not want to give them up. The other woman wanted to keep her bones with her out of a more religious idea: after her death she wanted to be reunited with them, in order to have her mortal remains intact on her journey through eternity. If these reasons are quite understandable, there is an odd side to them as well.