Let's talk about death.
I've lived in Guanajuato for three months now but I'd never been to one of the city's
most famous attractions, the mummy museum.
To be honest, I was drawn to the museum but I wasn't sure what I felt about about the
ethics of the place.
But eventually I decided I needed to go and see for myself what the hype was all about.
I won't lie, I was deeply moved by the experience of visiting these bodies.
I went into the museum with a lot of questions--and I left with even more.
First of all, there's the question of whether displaying these people's bodies in a tourist
attraction is honoring to the dead.
These are not people who signed up for this.
In 1870 a local law was passed requiring family members of buried people to pay a tax in order
to keep their family members in the cemetery.
So those whose families couldn't pay were disinterred from their above-ground crypts
and stored.
The area's climate had naturally mummified the bodies and so curious people began to
come and see them and eventually the museum was founded and the bodies were officially
displayed.
So there's obviously the money question.
These people were taken out of their crypts because their families couldn't pay the tax
to keep them where they'd been laid to rest.
So not only did they lose their own graves because of an unfair tax, but now thousands
of people pay entrance fees to see their corpses.
Is this exploitation?
I thought about this as I walked through the museum, seeing the bodies, contorted, many
naked, with their hair still visible.
To see them stripped so bare, behind glass--what would they feel if they knew their bodies
were being viewed like this?
But then I started to wonder if some of my objections were cultural.
Where I come from, death isn't something we talk about very openly.
We hide it, we hide from it, we don't want to think about it, we don't want to be reminded
that we're mortal.
That's not the case here in Mexico.
Here there seems to be much more openness about death, and mortality, and the human
body.
So perhaps my feelings about whether displaying a body is honoring or dishonoring to the person
it belonged to is a reflection of the culture I was raised in, where we do everything in
our power to sanitize death, to wish it away.
As I walked through the museum, I stopped at each body and looked at the person's face
before I took any pictures.
I silently thanked them and wished them well and hoped that they were at peace.
I took my time.
I moved slowly.
I studied the bones visible through patches of skin.
I wanted to honor these people with my attention.
I thought, were you happy when you were alive?
What did you love?
What made your heart beat fast?
When I got to the room with the babies, I cried.
I looked at their tiny hands and their tiny feet and I saw my own baby's hands and feet.
I remember how small Harper's feet were when she was a newborn.
I remember her tiny toes, the wrinkles on the soles of her feet.
How soft her skin was.
No parent should ever have to bury a child.
I cried as I looked at each child's face and I thought of the mothers who held these babies
as they left.
In 1945, American author Ray Bradbury visited Guanajuato and saw the mummies.
He wrote the short story, "The Next in Line" about the Guanajuato mummies and about that
visit he said, "The experience so wounded and terrified me I could hardly wait to flee
Mexico.
I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead, with those
propped and wired bodies."
Bradbury saw the mummies before the founding of the museum.
I left the mummies not in horror but in deep reverence.
I thought of how different these people's lives were from mine and yet how we're all
the same.
We all love and when we lose someone we love, our hearts break a thousand times.
And every person in the museum is someone who loved and was loved.
In the end there's nothing all that different between them and me.
My body has the same bones, the same skin, the same hair.
And that's why I think we can't look away from places like the mummy museum, why we
won't ever stop flocking to attractions like this.
We know we're mortal.
We know that beneath this skin are bones and muscles and that one day everything is going
to rot away except what doesn't.
One day, we won't be here.
And that's horrifying--and captivating.
It bothered me that this was a tourist attraction.
I hated the icons that pointed to places you could take pictures.
The mummy set up at the end you could sit and take a selfie with (I'm pretty sure it
was fake).
And yet, there I was, taking pictures of the bodies, taking video.
I was no better.
I had paid my admission.
And yet I found the experience so moving and so deeply human that I walked away not sure
whether to love or hate the museum.
Is this ethically and morally wrong?
Is it exploitative?
Or does it have something to teach us about the human condition?
Is there value here?
Or is the answer--as it usually is--somewhere in the middle?
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