It may seem like a strange thing to think, that we have dead people, that are missing. I don’t mean living people who vanished and are, were presumed dead. I mean the ones who knowingly died, but yet they are absent from the records, or they were removed from the normal decomposition process.

We all know there will always be people unaccounted for, in natural disasters for example many are lost and never recovered, but as we are led to believe, those bodies find their own natural resting place, so do become part of the decomposition process (I’ll abbreviate this to D.C for this as I may use it a lot). Even people that are murdered and buried, although they have been stolen from the living records, they at least become part of the earthly death records as it were.

Mummies – as we all know ancient Egyptians and other civilisations in South America and China preserved lots of their dead, for what ultimate purpose we can’t be sure, but they remain, or at least did. Turns out we had a rather macabre taste in the sixteenth century – called Mummy Brown, a paint. Yes, a paint. We used mummified remains to create a ‘luxurious’ brown paint for artists, completely destroying the remains to do so (human and feline). Which it turns out, most of the artists didn’t actually know where it came from, demand creating an extra market for other corpses when the supply ran low. Slaves and criminals were used instead. Once the artists began to find out what was in this paint though, it changed. They stopped using it, making the sinister trade drop off dramatically, and eventually ‘killing it’ altogether. One famous artist apparently ceremoniously buried his tube of Mummy Brown paint once he knew of its origins, such was the feelings about it at the time.

But, aside from the interesting facts about history and art there, I realised that meant there was a huge number of bodies missing from there, and everywhere, I know we can’t possibly know where all the dead people have been buried. And lots aren’t buried, they are cremated, which I have taken into account. This is only for the ones who were meant to become of that D.C.

Fertilizer – I didn’t realise we used to use the bones of the dead in fertilizer, should have considered it as I know we use other bonemeal as such, but there were times in the not-so distant-past, that we did. Before the trade of guano became a thing in the UK, it was bones that were used to top up the soils for nutrients as the population increased and food resources were stretched. It is said that battlefields would be raided, even graves robbed for the necessary components to be obtained. So, again, lots of people missing from the record.

Now, it isn’t the fact they are missing which is the issue, as I said, many get cremated so aren’t present either, or some are never found, or completely turn to dust. It’s the fact that it means we have an even more incomplete record that I at first thought. There are so many gaps, and holes in the bigger picture we are told is all sewn up and explained. I guess I thought because we had a doomsday book, and taxes, and courts and records for over 1000 years, we knew how many, and what, and how much. But we don’t really, only fragments of the past remain, and the gaps get filled in either by our own imagination, or someone else’s.

(c) K Wicks