My Dead Parents Are in the British Museum

Thought for the Fortnight

My dead parents are in the British Museum.

I know this sounds highly unlikely. Indeed, it sounds ridiculous. As if the great Museum itself would have room for my parents’ old bones.

Yet it is true. My late parents, both American, are in the British Museum. They never knew they would end up there, but I can honestly attest that they would have been absolutely thrilled if they had known. 

I must quickly add that it isn’t their bones – or any part of their bodies – that that are there. No, it is simply a photo of my parents that is on view. A photo of an old couple reading the Sunday newspaper on a bed together, labelled ‘parents reading’. Nothing remarkable in that.

Except for the fact that it is there at all.

Having a lie-down

I didn’t take the photo. A friend of the family did. But I liked it as it showed something very ordinary but connubial. Many (most?) couples like to have a little lie-down together, sometimes reading or sometimes talking, whatever their age. I am not talking about other reasons for having a lie-down in bed.

Presumably it was ever thus. Above my desk, I have a postcard of a statue of an older couple lying on a pallet of some sort and chatting. It is from the Etruscan Museum in Volterra, Italy; the card provides no date, but the Etruscans date from 900 BC. I don’t think the statue had any special prominence when I saw it (and bought the card) many years ago, but I note it is now being used to publicise the museum online.

Lying down is such a mundane, everyday activity that people hardly give it any thought. But I think it is important and even wrote about it a few years ago (see https://sixtyandme.com/the-many-joys-lying-in-bed-can-bring-to-a-senior-woman/), subsequently published in amended form in my book, The Granny who Stands on her Head.

My parents married in their mid-20s and had a long marriage ­– over 65 years. They died within three months of each other in 2000-01, both aged about 90. Having decided to donate their bodies to science, they were duly cremated and their ashes buried in a quiet patch of their beloved summer home in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Much nicer than any museum as a place of rest.

Cradle to Grave

So, how did their photo end up in the British Museum?  It started in 2003. The Museum had set up a new exhibition called Living and Dying, with artefacts from all over the world illustrating attitudes to living and dying.  It contains an odd collection of items, but that doesn’t matter. 

As part of this exhibition, Dr. Henrietta Lidchi, the lead curator, commissioned a small group of contemporary artists, known as Pharmacopoeia, to produce an art installation portraying the use of medication in modern Britain. This is called Cradle to Grave, often referred to as as CtoG (or C2G).

The artists set out to show the number of prescription drugs used by the average man and woman in Britain over the course of their lifetime, in the exact order in which they were taken. They had wanted to include over-the-counter drugs as well, but this proved too complex a task. I have heard the exhibition referred to as ‘that long table in the British Museum showing all the pills we take’ and that is a good basic description.

It is very beautifully set out, with little knitted pockets for each pill, done with some flair. One of the group did all the knitting. Another, a friend of mine and a general practitioner, had to decide what diseases to give this ‘typical’ man and woman and what drugs they each would then be prescribed.

Although the principal focus of the art installation was the multiplicity of pills taken by the current British population, the artists felt that the overall effect would be improved by photos of people at all stages of life, mirroring the stages at which the pills were taken. Here, they particularly wanted to give the ‘feel’ of the kind of photographs found in the albums of ordinary families (this was before the time when mobile phones took over that role).

Family and friends were invited to submit whatever they had to hand and the resulting mounds of photos were, I am told, studied at some length and selected with great care.

I do not consider myself an especially good photographer, but I submitted a number of photos that I thought might prove useful. I assumed they would get loads of cute children’s photos, but few of older people, so I sought to balance that out. They decided to accept three of my photos, including the one I had labelled ‘parents reading’, as noted above. 

The two others consisted of a photo of my elderly and elegant Polish neighbour looking very healthy (although she was almost blind and suffered from lung cancer), which I labelled ‘Katherine in her garden’. And one of my son, then a toddler, who had crawled into a kitchen cupboard with pots and pans and looked very worried about how he was going to get out, which I labelled ‘Anthony exploring’.

The labels proved significant because the decision was made to keep the labels as submitted, although they were originally intended simply as an aide memoire for the person doing the submitting.

Why is it popular?

As far as I can tell, the Cradle to Grave installation has proved very popular.  Originally planned to last just seven years, it is still there twenty years later. And there are always loads of people around it whenever I have visited.

I don’t know what the British Museum experts think, but I have my own idea about why people like it. I think that many people – both tourists and locals – go to the British Museum because it is there. It is one of the great sights that one should ‘do’ in London. They’re not really interested in most ancient artefacts, but look briefly at the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian mummies and the occasional other exhibition because they feel they should. 

And then, possibly by chance, they come upon this table that is all about them. It’s about all those pills taken by Grandad or Aunt Ethel or the friend down the road. Perhaps, indeed, they are on substantial medication themselves.

It sets them talking: “I never realised how many pills we took!”  “Good heavens, it’s a lot of pills when you see them spread over the years!” It is very beautiful to look at, it is stimulating – and does not require any knowledge of history. 

It resonates with something they know at first hand. And I suspect they remember it years later. They look at all the pills and all the photos and feel they add up to some real meaning.

Including my parents reading.

The exhibition is in a long cabinet on the ground floor, just off the Great Hall.

 ©Tom Lee