Morbid Mementos

Let’s start with something scary. Gross, maybe.

In the basement of my parent’s flower shop, hidden in the farthest, darkest corner from the access, is a massive pile of human hair. The story goes that at one time, the back room was a barber shop, and hidden behind the paneling was an old laundry shoot. The barbers used to sweep up after each clip and toss the hair down the laundry shoot.

Disgusting.

And creepy.

I know.

But why? Why is hair so creepy?

The other day I told one of my coworkers, “I’m a little sad my sister’s husband already trimmed my nephew’s baby hair!”

She was not as concerned until I added: “I kinda hope my sister kept a little lock for herself.”

“What? Eww! No!” my coworker gasped. And all the girls– each about ten years younger than me– chimed in that such a memento would be morbid. Revolting.

“I just don’t understand,” my coworker said, “why people used to do that. Like yuck. I was going through my grandma’s stuff a few months ago and found someone’s rotten old tooth– I think it was hers!”

This touched off a conversation about the strange and horrible mementos people used to collect. That they were horrible was my coworkers’ opinion, but as I listened, I realized a few things.

1.) Our younger generations have a deep aversion to the past and zero desire to understand it or the people who inhabited it. INCLUDING their own parents and grandparents, sometimes. 2.) We have a strange and bifurcated relationship with hair.

Let’s tackle the first. My mother possesses a few of these morbid mementos. I know right where they are, too– in her beige jewelry box, 80s vintage, tucked somewhere on the upper shelf in her closet. My mother doesn’t wear jewelry often, so this case has become a morbid memento deposit. There are locks of hair, baby teeth, and snipped hospital wristbands. All of the things people hold to remind themselves of the precious moments as they slip past. But as I talked to my younger friends, I realized they had no care for physical reminders of these moments. They viewed keeping baby teeth with a similar horror to serial killers collecting trophies.

Initially, I was embarrassed to bring it up. Do people not do this? Is my mother weird? But no, I’ve read enough and talked to enough women from my mother’s generation and above– this was definitely done. And if literature is anything to go by, it was done often and cherished. This put my mind into overdrive. Is it a tradition left over from the age of high infant mortality? Have we inherited the memento gathering from women who clipped locks of baby hair to prove their baby existed should it die? Did they keep envelopes of baby teeth because it was a sign of growth and survival? Or did they do all this simply because they didn’t have cameras, pictures, and videos, unlike us?

But…

Are pictures and videos better? Most of us have thousands of files in our camera rolls, which will disappear into the nebulous ether of the digital cloud– almost impossible to recall unless you know exactly what you’re looking to recall. Rather like our own memories. This leads me to think that morbid memento gatherers were onto something. Hair is such a personal thing– a piece of you– and having a lock of it seems more solid and less ephemeral than a photo– not that pictures are bad, but hair is so much a part of you, your DNA is imprinted in it.

I was curious to see where this idea of collecting hair came about. According to Wikipedia, keeping a lock from your baby’s first haircut is supposed to bring good luck.¹ Which makes a certain sense. A lot of these traditions arise from superstitions, and modern people continue the practice without knowing why they do it. According to an article on the history of hair collecting, “Modern hair collecting began with the Victorians, who prized long hair as a sign of feminity, as opposed to powdered wigs of past eras.” Giving a lock of one’s hair was seen as a more intimate gesture than giving an autograph; however, giving locks or “hair work” (jewelry made from human hair) was generally reserved for loved ones.² Deborah Lutz connects this Victorian obsession with the Protestant relic worship of even early times.³ But even in my cursory investigation, I saw that hair has played an important and symbolic role across cultures and throughout history.

So why are modern people so creeped out by it? It’s not that we don’t still have a hair obsession. We do. I haven’t looked up the statistics, but I’m sure Americans pay more NOW for hair care, wigs, and implants than any culture before it. But what’s shifted the attitude of these new generations to see its collection as macabre? Is it because each generation slips even farther from any connections to or the base knowledge of Protestantism? Perhaps, the very indelibleness of hair creeps us out. To the modern, secular human, the body is just a body, and when you die, that’s it. Your shell rots and the earth spins. But hair is easily preserved and can remain uncorroded long after the rest of the body has decomposed. I think the hair’s indelibleness carries a whisper of the eternal. And to a culture that has largely cut ties with the idea of eternality– especially where it concerns the individual– hair’s imperviousness to decomposition gives us the willies. Like a ghost.

For the modern American mother, uninterested in Victorian superstitions or the inheritances thereof, she would much rather collect the vaporous pixels of digital photography than the soft curl from her baby’s first haircut. She will store her mementos in a digital vault not controlled by her, and if she’s smart, she’ll at least have a few of the photos printed out. But– I think– does photo stock escape the ravages of time as well as that soft baby curl?

The answer, of course, is No. And the real issue here may be that we’ve just stopped thinking about how long things last.

The time is NOW. And it’s still NOW. And it’ll always be NOW. We’ve lost our grip on context.

_¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_of_hair

² https://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/blogs/unique-items/the-history-of-hair-collecting

³ https://daily.jstor.org/why-victorians-loved-hair-relics/