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Wife won't agree to husband's 'f***ing insane' tooth tradition after death; he begs.

Wife won't agree to husband's 'f***ing insane' tooth tradition after death; he begs.

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When this woman is concerned with her husband's family tradition, she asks Reddit:

'AITA for not wanting to participate in DH family's death teeth ritual?'

My husband's family has an extremely bizarre set of rituals surrounding death and funerals.

They're from Wales, but I don't think this is a cultural thing and I haven't been able to find a basis for it or even anything remotely similar from a cultural/religious background. I think they might just be a bunch of weirdos.

So here goes. In my husband's family, before a corpse of a recently deceased family member is buried they will have all of the teeth of the deceased knocked out, and will give one tooth to each of their living relatives to keep with them in a fabric pouch which they're meant to keep with them.

They even have a system for how they decide which family member gets which tooth based on their proximity to the deceased. Any teeth that the deceased has collected themselves over their life is added into a ornate chest which is literally filled with thousands of human teeth (apparently this goes back many generations).

I found out about this tradition about a year after I got married to my husband at his grandmother's funeral when my MIL gave me a pouch with one of her molars.

My husband got very upset when I told him I didn't want to participate in this ritual. At the time I was only talking about not wanting to carry around his family member's teeth, but evidently it's expected that after I die they'll knock out my teeth to be distributed to the family members.

He asked me whether I would really deny my children the ability to have something to remind them of me after I pass away or to feel left out from their cousins.

I'm trying to be understanding and polite, and other than this his family is lovely, but to me this whole practice seems completely fking insane.

I don't want my teeth knocked out and distributed to a bunch of random relatives, and there's no way in hell that my side of the family will understand or accept this. AITA for not accepting this, based on how our last conversation went I think he's going to threaten divorce.

Let's see what Reddit had to say.

bonniebluest writes:

NTA. WTF... I'm horrified after reading that! They're your teeth.... If you don't want them knocked out and distributed i think that's fair! ....A chest full of teeth. That's not leaving my mind for awhile.

kiwibird1 writes:

YTA. But softly. Anthropologically, this is fascinating. Death is a taboo subject, and we have a horror surrounding it that is a relatively new thing in the past century or so.

Mortuary rituals are important to a vast amount of people, and honestly this isn't the 'weirdest' or most 'ghoulish' I've heard of. And honestly it's not really that much different from keeping ashes (in an urn, a locket, a glass keepsake) or being an organ and tissue donor.

Okay, odd. Is OP TA? What do YOU think?

Sources: Reddit
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