The Grave Cage Was Only A Rental

Four bucks gets you twenty-four pages on running a writing operation by yourself, and I spend part of them admitting what short form will never do for you.

An English instructor sells a twenty-one dollar workbook on cutting wordy sentences without turning your voice into oatmeal, which is the part I still get wrong.

THE TIP. Some graves in Scotland had a cage on them, and the family only rented it.

A corpse wasn’t legally anybody’s property. Get caught digging one up and you rarely did half a year, while a gang with wooden spades and a sack over the coffin lid could have the body out in under half an hour. Delivery pizza takes longer.

So families hired a mortsafe. A few weeks. Once the body had rotted, the cage came off and went to the next grave.

Rot was the expiration date. Nobody had a reason to dig past it, so nobody paid to guard past it, which is cheap as hell. Then the Anatomy Act of 1832 changed where the surgeons got their bodies.

So when some guru tells me to lock everything down forever, I think about that cage. (Some of it, sure, ya’ll. Some of that shit only has to hold a few weeks.) Good luck selling those families the lifetime plan.

Got a mortsafe in a churchyard near you? Hit reply with a photo and I’ll trade you a story for it. ~ J.D.