On the human essence

By Norm Nason

The skull's home on my bookcase, where it has remained for years.

I raised an eyebrow. "A skull?"

"Yes," she said, "a real human skull."

"How did you come to own it?"

She explained that when she moved into her house she discovered it in a hat box in her attic. "I would rather not keep it," she said. "It gives me the creeps."

Curiosity getting the better of me, I told her that I wouldn't mind taking the skull off her hands, should she wish to part with it. I bid her good afternoon and went home for the day, and soon forgot about the matter entirely. The following morning, however, I discovered a hat box resting on my classroom chair, with a note attached that said, simply: "I'm glad it found a home."

I opened the box and sure enough, inside, wrapped carefully in layers of newspaper, was a human skull. The specimen was in extremely good condition, and had obviously been prepared for use in academic settings. The bone was lightly varnished, and the cranium was cut and removable, positioned with little clamps and pins on each side. Springs held the mandible in place, allowing it to hinge realistically. Although the teeth were beautiful (only one small molar cavity), one incisor had been cut away to expose the porous interior.

It's strange to hold a human skull in your hands, slowly rotating it like a ball, examining all of its many and varied features. Doing this raised many questions in my mind. Was it male or female? What age was this person when he/she died, and what was the cause of death? What kind of life did he/she lead, and in what part of the world?

I opened the cranium and peered inside, where the missing brain's folds, veins and arteries had left permanent impressions on the growing bone's smooth inner surface. All that this person was--all thoughts and aspirations, joys and sorrows, achievements and failures--once resided in this now hollow and silent space.

I traced the contours of the eye sockets with one hand while feeling the outline of my own with the other. How similar they both were. I touched the mastoid process beneath my right ear, which serves as an attachment for the neck muscle of the same name, then the arch of the zygoma at my cheek. It was one thing to feel it, but quite another to simultaneously feel and see it's counterpart on the donated skull. Perhaps these features had once craned upward to watch a sparrow in flight, turned with empathy toward a crying infant, or tilted longingly to receive a lover's kiss.

The student who gave me the skull has long since slipped from my memory. But the skull remains in my possession, and I have come to feel some affection and responsibility for it, and for what it suggests about the person of whom it was once an intimate part. The skull rests on a shelf in my office and faces passively toward my back while I work, even as I type these lines. It is a constant reminder to me that once a person existed who no longer exists, except perhaps in this simple way: by the will of one who remains alive as yet, and ponders the bone's many mysteries. I have become its caretaker, a preserver of the last vestige of an individual who once walked the Earth that I walk, and breathed the air that I breathe. There is much that I do not know about this individual, but I do know something, and perhaps more than anyone now living. It is both my duty, and my privilege, to validate his/her existence.