Wise and wizened.

Feb 04

MeredithUncategorized , , Comments Off

Tomorrow I shall go forth and have two wisdom teeth extracted from my head. I am not thrilled about this idea.

I asked the dentist if could have the teeth. He said that normally they send them away with all the other biohazard materials, but that I could have them. I would just have to remind him beforehand or he’d forget.

Something about my teeth, forlorn at the bottom of an orange biohazard bag, made me sad. And I got to thinking about some scrap of memory that I had. Some long lost recalling that Jews must save all the body parts of a person to bury them. I think I heard about it in reference to terrorist bombings in Israel, and that people have to go out to look for the pieces of their loved ones.

(Thanks to Google, I know that this is in fact true and that Orthodox Jews save teeth, amputated limbs, and excised appendixes for eventual burial.)

There is something about that idea that appeals to me. According to The Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics, “The body of a dead Jew retains sanctity even after death. The body is not just a container which houses the holy soul, but the body itself has intrinsic holiness.”

I’m not Jewish. In fact, I’m only mildly religious at all, so I come at it from a slightly different stance. It seems to me that this body is what we go through life with, it is our companion, our host.

I know it seems absurd to feel connected to one’s teeth, particularly those teeth that wait so long to appear and then have no particular function except to, at best, simply exist and, at worst, cause severe pain.

But I’ve spent all day tonguing the little stub of a tooth back there and trying to imagine it’s absence. It’s a lonely type of feeling.

And so tomorrow, when I walk into the dentist’s office, I will ask him to save my teeth.

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