Use Every Part
by David Gaffney
Photo Tom Kay
On the day you died a whale appeared on the beach at Whitehaven and I went down to look at it.
In olden times they used every part of a whale's body after they killed it. The meat, skin, blubber and organs were eaten. Whalebones were made into corsets and ceremonial things like masks. Whale teeth were engraved with pictures and inked with soot. The oil was used in lamps. Baleen, the fronds in the whale's mouth that filtered the plankton, were used for hairbrushes, fishing rods, pastry crimpers, shoehorns, hat-rims, prosthetic limbs, tongue scrapers. throat swabs, wind-up toys, hula-hoops, divining rods, piano keys – all made out of baleen.
I put my hand on the skin of the whale and felt its distant heartbeat as an electrical throbbing like a refrigerated truck.
I wondered whether I should use all of you in the same way, now you were gone; your hair for my pillows, your eyes for marbles, your ears for ash trays, your skull for my soup, your thigh bone for a flute, your toes as counters, your fingers as cutlery.
This seemed a more loving end than a scattering of ashes or a burial, and I wondered whether this was something that the council could organise.
