Eleanor Black: Setting free the skeleton in my father's closet

Eleanor Black and her father, circa 1995.

This is how you pack a skeleton for travel: gingerly, with clumsy fingers, wishing there was someone else available to do it. Rolled in sheets of bubble wrap and old, clean blankets. Nestled in a box you fossicked from outside Noel Leeming as a crispy haired woman with no sense of occasion honked her horn at your 80-year-old mother. Some people would shove a skeleton in any old box, but not you.

You lay the skeleton on your parents' bed and apologise for the indignities of the process. The cat hair all over the bedspread is one of those indignities. The dust and fly specks need to be wiped off brittle, yellowing bones with a moist paper towel. The fact that it has taken 20 years to even get to this point.

You push extra bubble wrap into the chest cavity where a rib is broken, the tip sheared off who-knows-when-or-how. You use an entire roll of bubble wrap, but there's no getting around it. Wrapped in its blanket shroud and propped in the box, the skeleton looks exactly like what it is. Human.

He was known as Fred. For years he was the actual skeleton hanging in my parents' actual bedroom closet. He was a family joke. I used to show him to my friends, pulling aside my dad's old suits with a flourish: "Look, it's real! Touch it!" Most people found the skeleton creepy but I loved it.

For most of my life I thought Fred came from a donor; that some pragmatic gentleman had made provisions in his will to leave his body to a medical institution. I imagined that once his organs had been passed on to people who needed them, his bones were cleaned and reassembled into a teaching tool, so people would continue to benefit from his generosity for many years. This was a total fiction.

In the months since I bubble wrapped Fred, I have scooted down many rabbit holes, looking for a likely history. My informed guess is that Fred was picked out of a medical catalogue sometime in the 1960s or 70s, when my father worked for a hospital in Vallejo, California. A human skeleton was standard professional kit then. An orthopaedic surgeon like my dad would use their office skeleton to explain procedures to patients. "We'll make an incision here," he would say, pointing with a ballpoint pen. "The screw will go here."

One thing I am nearly certain of — the man whose skeleton hung in my parents' house for 40 years did not choose to give his remains to science. It is not a thought that would have crossed his mind. That decision would have been made for him, after his death, when a professional bone trader in India, the major source of medical skeletons for nearly 150 years, would have picked him up, perhaps from a graveyard, riverbank or street — with his family's permission or not — and taken him to a workshop for processing.

The house where Fred lived for 40 years.

Methods for treating skeletons have varied through time and from place to place, from the grotesque to the reassuringly clinical. A popular method in India was submerging the body in hydrogen peroxide to strip the flesh from the bones, then laying them out in sunshine to bleach them. These skeletons were prized for their vivid whiteness and the quality of their hardware, the expert articulation that made them good teaching aides.

An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 skeletons and 50,000 skulls were each year exported from Kolkata to medical institutions in the West until India banned the bone trade in 1985. It was rumoured that people were murdered to meet the demand. According to some reports, Kolkata is still the hub of a lucrative black market trade in bones.

I doubt my dad knew where Fred came from, or ever really thought about it. The ready supply of human skeletons, that efficient bone pipeline, seems not to have been questioned too deeply, at least by the medical professionals who used them. First, do no harm. Besides, Dad could be practical to the point of coldness. In order to understand human anatomy, you need to be able to look inside the body. Someone's bones must be used. Someone's heart and lungs and brain must be preserved for students to see.

For some reason when we moved to Aotearoa as a family, in 1977, Fred was pulled apart like a roast chicken at a picnic. His arms and legs were gifted to the incoming chief of the orthopaedic department at the hospital in California. His ribcage (attached to a thick rubber sternum), scapula, clavicles, spine and pelvis, sacrum and coccyx came with us. I don't know where his head went.

Eleanor Black and her father in 1995.

You can still buy and sell genuine human skeletons in the United States, there is a collector's market. As you would expect, they cost many thousands of dollars and people tend to approach them either with reverence or an obnoxious nonchalance that reminds me of my 8-year-old self. "Hey guys, look at the skeleton in my closet!" There is an annual uptick in sales around Halloween, because dressing and displaying human bones is apparently always hilarious, even when they are real.

To learn more about my father's skeleton, I emailed the owner of the Bone Room, a market-leading "natural history store" in Los Alamitos, California, which deals in animal and human bones; their bestsellers include animal tail keyrings, geckos suspended in lucite, coyote mandibles and the "budget snake skeleton", a venomous pit viper. Given the timeframe, she said it would have been imported from India into the US by one of two businesses. Kilgore International, based in Coldwater, Michigan, is the larger of the two operations. For many years it was reportedly the top supplier of human bones to the American market. After the Indian supply chain was shut down, the founder commented regretfully in his local newspaper that plastic anatomy models were "junk". Since 1987 the business has specialised in dental models.

Carolina Biological, in Burlington, North Carolina, sells plastic skeletons; an Economy Disarticulated Human Skeleton is US$485 ($1347). The Desktop Miniature Skeleton is US$74, which seems like a deal I almost can't pass up. I could display it next to the picture of me and Dad at Waikanae Beach in Gisborne circa 2000, taken when he was having a day out from the dementia unit where he spent his last years. The sun is shining and we wield matching smiles, uncertain but hopeful.

This was when Dad still wore jeans and button down shirts, not the easy-wash jogging pants and sweatshirts he ended up in, and a day out was still possible but turned sour as soon as he realised we were taking him back to "that place". "I thought I could trust you," he would tell me, tugging on his seatbelt. "I'll never forgive you." That photo is a wormhole, pulling me back to the saddest time of my life, and it could really do with some sort of visual punctuation to perk it up, like a miniature skeleton with "a removable skull cap and hinged jaw". "Hey guys, look at the skeleton in my office!"

When my grandparents retired from farming, they built a two-bedroom house in Gisborne on land that had been an orchard. In the mid-80s, Dad converted their carport into a garage and Fred was moved there from the bedroom closet. He hung next to a punching bag with an old medical scrub top draped over him, twisting gently as people brushed past to get to the bikes or the lawnmower or a box of photo albums.

Dad spent a lot of time in the garage, especially as his brain curdled. He would move boxes from one corner to another for hours, pop open a trunk and pull out pairs of bell-bottom jeans with rainbows stitched around the pockets and polyester shirts with exaggerated pointed collars, and make a face. Why the hell did we hang on to these? He did a very funny downturned sad face, like a toddler who just lost a lolly under the sofa. A tall, thin toddler with crepe-soled shoes and reading glasses tucked in his front pocket.

Each time we left California we would pack up the contents of our house and ship everything to Gisborne, container loads of stuff that we just couldn't bear to part with. Furniture, American appliances that needed converters, cars, a caravan, a motorcycle, windsurfing board, road cycles, skis, an eight-person tent, a weight machine, saddles and bridles, computers, sheets, table linen. Some things that were transported at great expense and hassle across the Pacific Ocean were used just once or twice. The one that bothered me most was the eight-piece dinner set embossed with green leaves and tropical flowers that I remember buying from Macy's at Union Square in San Francisco, me liquefied by boredom and spilling off a display sofa while my parents imagined the dinner parties they would host.

For about 25 years my parents were engaged in the business of starting again. Dad was planning his next move when had his first major stroke, he collapsed while walking down the main street of Calistoga, California. He was 78 years old. I was in Gisborne, house-sitting for my parents, and I remember my mother calling to tell me that Dad was in hospital and the doctor had ordered a brain scan. It took about a year for it to become clear to us that Dad was no longer capable of making important decisions, that his time as the master of our three-person ocean-going raft was finished.

The same weekend that Fred was packed up I helped make decisions about the other stuff Dad had left behind in the garage. It was a job that weighed heavily, as if removing the oil cans and slide projector would erase the last vestiges of his presence. But I was practical. To the point of coldness, you might say. Tools would go to a family friend. Out-of-date orthopaedic textbooks would be recycled. Surplus gardening gear would go to the Salvation Army.

Hanging above shelves he had built for storing jars of old nails and useful bits of string, I found objects he had hung on metal wire hand-twisted into hooks. They dangled from nails: a pencil, a plastic valve, a sink plug, a small pair of surgical scissors attached to a ski lift pass void after April 13, 1984. I photographed Dad's objects-on-hooks as if they were art installations. I turned them over in my hands knowing that the last fingers to touch them had been his, that some of his DNA might still be there, with me, and then I threw them into the skip. At some point, you just have to let go.

Eleanor Black and her father in 1995.

After you have packed the skeleton and sealed the box, you carry it to the front door and set it down next to an ugly wooden fruit sculpture, a gift from a grateful patient. Dad kept all the gifts and cards, ate all the baking. His favourite present was a sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by an artist who needed many operations over decades. The inscription read: "And yet how lovely life would seem if ev'ry man could weave a dream to keep him from despair." Towards the end of his life, Dad would sit in his arm chair and cradle that sculpture.

The skeleton is couriered to the anatomy museum at Dad's medical school. You email the curator, concerned that after years of neglect it will not be useful to him after all. "It is in pretty good nick," he replies. "I may even take your father's modifications of adding nerves — string and wire — to a more permanent formal arrangement." His kindness loosens a knot in your chest. You imagine your practical father winding bits of wire and string through the vertebrae to show patients how nerves interact with muscle and bone, and help identify the source of their pain.