Alas, Poor Yorick: Digging Up the Dead to Make Medical Diagnoses

0184 Preparing for Death How does one prepare for death? Those who have created a public persona must add to any spiritual ponderings about eternity the mundane chore of organizing their literary archives to protect any of life’s secrets that seem worth the effort. That task involves choosing what diaries, letters, drafts, and laundry lists to donate to a university or to leave in a closet for legions of biographical ragpickers to quote, misquote, or variously interpret in as yet unimaginable contexts— or to burn. Many well-known fi gures contemplating their posthumous selves have been foiled in exercising control over their literary remains. Purposefully confounding future biographers, Sigmund Freud burned his early papers and admonished his wife Martha to destroy their love letters. Instead, she bequeathed us this charming insight into the youthful exuberance of the patriarch of psychoanalysis, written in 1884: “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body” [1]. Anaïs Nin, whose voluminous diaries recorded her daily life in exquisite, compulsively recorded detail, had better luck in choreographing her literary afterlife. While alive, she published volumes of carefully edited literary diaries. When someone at a seminar remarked to her that her life seemed more, well, racy than those diaries revealed, she smiled mysteriously and said that after the death of all concerned, “unexpurgated” editions would be published. Several decades later, companion volumes to the literary diaries revealed passionate incest with her father, Joachim Nin, an affair with her analyst, Otto Rank, and successfully bigamous marriages in New York and California. When André Gide revealed that Oscar Wilde had had sexual relations with a young Arab boy in Egypt, Wilde’s friend Robert Sherard lamented: “Heavens! The task of shooing hyenas away from the graves of the illustrious dead.” Sherard meant Wilde’s literary grave—but what about actual graves? What about history’s corpus delicti?