I think I’ve finally found my creeped-out point. It came on a Dublin street when I realized I had crypt dust all over my boots.
Growing up, I never thought of myself as particularly quirky or odd. Certainly not macabre, or even weird. I played team sports, I followed plenty of silly fashion fads and slightly-less-silly music bands, I was just high enough in various social heaps to be comfy without having to work too hard or worry too much. I didn’t think about the fact that, where most families go for the bunny/kitty/duckie school of decor and pets, we leaned toward frog/bat/turtle. Or that preppy-punk might be a social (and fashion) oxymoron.
Fast forward a few years. I pull my bone-inspired jewelry out of dusty boxes and drawers where it’s been waiting to ride out the skulls-on-everything trend. I am tickled by my six-year-old’s absolute insistance on pairing her white-dress-and-wings Halloween costume with vampire teeth (I’m not sure Dun Laoghaire was quite ready for Weeping Angels); my family adopts the Dead Zoo as our default Sunday activity during our time in Ireland. I immerse myself in some undeniably macabre research since I’ve become determined to write a sweet hearts-and-flowers YA book about bog bodies.
It’s not until I casually suggest to my mother that maybe I’m a little quirky, odd, even macabre, that all becomes clear. Her response? (I paraphrase:) “Well, duh!” The most dog-eared book in our home library was a coffee-table behemoth about King Tut, along with a battered copy of “Hattie the Backstage Bat”. My mother works with the Leakey Foundation, whose rockstars are, absolutely, rockstars, but wouldn’t know Bono (you just know they would say “Bone-Oh”) if he hit them with a femur. My brother studied anthropology before going the hedge-fund route (he’s the practical one among us, but he still does an incomparable Apatasaurus when playing with his toddler son). My opera-singer sis does Wagner. The other spent a few years in a Black Metal band. It’s not just me. It’s familial, maybe even notched onto a maternal chromosome.
Which is all a slightly rambly preamble to me standing in front of Dublin Castle, having a very quiet, calm freak-out because I’ve just realized I have dead people on my feet. Up to my knees, actually.
It was Saturday, we were meeting the Himself Seniors at Silk Road (gotta get a plug in; it’s some of the best food in Dublin) in the Castle later for lunch. What a perfect time, we decided, to visit St. Michan’s Church. Dates from the 11th Century, amazing woodwork, an organ on which Handel played “The Messiah”…lots of interesting features. But most people go to Michan’s for one thing: the mummies.
All vital info can be found on the church’s website. What I can add:
Our guide was energetic, entertaining (he had sound effects for everything, including the nasty things that happened post- and pre-mortem to some of the crypt’s residents) and worldly enough to have something specific to say to every single visitor; it was a small group, but he chatted football with the German couple, the Edinburgh music scene with the Scots, and endeared himself to San Franciscan me by insulting Los Angeles. I can imagine what he says about SF to the Angelenos.
The crypts are packed–coffin atop coffin in dark little chambers–and exactly as eerie as you’d expect. Since most are technically still in use (descendants of crypt-holders could ostensibly have a place with their great-great-great-whatevers), they aren’t lit. But you can peek in. Coffin atop coffin. And in one, I saw a discarded modern work glove under a few layers of dust, which yes, is litter in a graveyard and should be cleaned up, but also kinda fit in to the macabre aura, like some poor mason got sent down to check a wall…and never came back up.
The mummies are creepy–dessicated and twisted and very very dusty– and very cool. They range from the 19th century back, and include (supposedly) a reformed criminal, a nun, and a Crusader. The Crusader, who almost certainly post-dates all Crusades by at least a century, would have been 6’6″ in life and was altered (you can find details elsewhere) to fit his coffin. My mother-in-law had once told us how, when she was a school-girl in Dublin more than fifty years ago, she got to “shake hands” (really just touch the finger) with him. But, she told us, that gruesome tradition was long gone.
Apparently not.
Because we were a small group, maybe, we got the invitation to “shake”. Madam and Himself Jr. declined. I hesitated; believe it or not, I have very mixed feelings about the morality of looking at mummies, but that’s a slippery soapbox for another time. Of course I climbed into the hole and touched his hand. It was smooth, cold, and very hard, like slightly dusty stone. I apologized silently for the intrusion–I was a lot more bothered by that than the fact that I was touching a dead body.
In fact, I was suprised by how blase I was about the whole thing. Motherhood, I figured, which not only gives you a completely new view on mortality, but also a much much higher tolerance for things icky, gruesome, or gross. I was fine.
Until half an hour later, when I looked down at my black, knee-high boots, and realized they were gray with St. Michan’s crypt dust. Which is, of course, a combo of limestone and…well, residents. That got me. After the aforementioned quiet, calm freak-out, I headed into the Castle ladies’ room. A damp paper towel would at least deal with the dust. I would deal with the idea of the dust. But in one more ironic, very-Irish ecological quirk, there were no paper towels, only flimsy toilet paper and electric hand dryers. Save a tree. I get it; I absolutely support and applaud it. I wouldn’t say a thing if this country didn’t wrap almost every single grocery item in a layer of plastic on a plastic tray, sealed with another layer of plastic.
I wore bits of somebody’s great-great-auntie home. I can’t decide if it’s better that it almost certainly wasn’t any relation of mine. I do think it’s probably a good thing for my moral center that it still gives me a little shudder when I think of it. I’m okay with recognizing my odd, quirky, slightly macabre side. I’ll worry when I stop thinking about it.
The mummies of St. Michan’s.