Memento Maury

Feng and Maury

I really want a good, university quality anatomical skeleton like they have in physical therapy offices, but they are really, really expensive. The pop-up Halloween store on Walnut Street was having a half off sale on all Halloween decorations, and I was able to get a pretty good, life sized skeleton with articulated joints for only $20. I was exuberant carrying him back to my office, and then on my lap in MK’s car as we drove to Target for “cheap candy day,” which is a holiday that Andrew invented. The skeleton is called Maury.

A few days ago, I found a comic I had drawn of myself doing daily tasks and running into different skeletons who were saying things like “you have lots of debt!” “She is probably mad at you.” I’d forgotten about the comic, but it’s true that I often use skeletons to represent depression or anxiety, and it’s strange that I always want them, or pictures of them, around, because I do not like depression and anxiety at all.

Of course, skeletons remind us of death, but I am either too young or too lucky to spend much time being anxious about death. It’s abstract. And I like the macabre giggle that comes with the realization that everyone has a scary skeleton inside them at all times. Our bodies are haunted closets, or pyramid pits or abandoned pirate ships.  They’re burial grounds in which are interred creepy skeletal hands and grinning skulls.

Anxiety lives in the bones with depression.  Fear is a ghost that flits through your heart, and nervousness sits in your stomach. You can have sadness in your lips or the flesh of your face. But depression is in the spongy marrow of your skeleton. Like alcoholics have the wisdom to know that they can only become sober drunks, depressed people know that we can feel joy but not be happy.  

Faith, too, sits in the bones. It’s not the passing brain-fancy of a conviction or the heart-knowledge of a belief. Faith is down in the marrow and wrapped in hard calcium, its protective case defining the body and protecting the heart, stomach and mind.  These things, even the terrible ones can be loved and sat with, but not extracted.

Teeth are the only bones that come out where we can see them. I love taking my wisdom teeth out of the envelope that I keep them in and looking at them, and I like having Maury and my other, smaller skeletons around. It gives me a grim but lovely pleasure to embrace that my anxiousness and depression are foundational. This knowledge and the incongruent joy that springs from it combine to make what I know to be faith.

When I got Maury home, I put him in the living room to try to scare John, although, predictably, this was a terrible failure. Andrew asked if I was going to keep him in the living room, and I said that no, I was going to put him in my room, and Andrew giggled and said that he was struck with the image of me curled up in my bed with my arms around the skeleton.

But to me, that’s kind of an ideal image of myself: comfortable with the immutable, if unpleasant aspects of my life.  Embracing them.  The whole thing making a weird hilarious picture.  I’ll aspire to that.