Marrow

What do you know in your bones?

There are 206 bones in the human body. We’re born with about 300 and some of them fuse together as we grow, eventually making up the framework of ourselves the way we know it to be. I’ve never broken a bone. Maybe a toe once or twice but that remains unconfirmed. I have seen bones though. Not my own. I’ve toured the catacombs in Paris a couple of times. It’s a shocking and moving experience, to see these real and true parts of people who were real and true, disassembled and stacked, often in beautiful patterns, trailing along for miles and miles under the earth. Under the streets that living people walk every day. And they don’t even notice.

When all the rest is faded and gone, our bones will be the final physical part of us that remains. I wonder if we’d be able to identify them if we saw them. Would I know mine from another’s? If I sorted through a pile of them, would I recognize, say, a vertebrae? A rib?