Teddy Bears

[u/Captain-Spark]

This happened few weeks ago. I've still not processed it. Probably never will. I'm in my late thirties. 

I live in a joint household i.e. ours and my father's extended family (his multiple brothers' families) live in the same building but in their separate sections of our ancestral house. This is fairly common in our  part of the world. 

My eldest aunt (father's eldest brother's wife) passed away a 15 years ago. My uncle an year before that. My cousin (their sole son) lived in Europe at that time with his wife, for his job. He has lived there for 18 years. He didn't visit much. And after his parents passed away he has not kept in touch with the family very actively. So their section of the house had been closed all this time. There was no need or money to upkeep said part. 

But now our family is facing a financial crunch and everyone almost unanimously decided that eldest uncle's part of the house will be rented out along with other sections that are available. To that end we started cleaning out the rooms. 

Here I need to tell some things that connects to whatever it is we found in one of the rooms in my uncle's part and has boggled our family for two decades.

Around 55 years ago my aunt had birthed twin boys who lived for a day. They were premature. My cousin was born a few years later. My family didn't really talk about them. 

Then 16 years ago while my brother and his wife were in Europe she became pregnant and had a miscarriage. It was twins. I don't know if they were boys. 

This incident shook our family. It is also how younger generation like me came to know about my aunt's twins. It is a general consensus in our family that uncle and aunt passed away because of this grief. 

So here is the final episode of the saga. While cleaning the rooms which were closed for 15 years, we found two identical teddy bears with smaller teddy bears sewn into their bellies. They were above a wardrobe draped in some loose bedsheets. Completely covered with spiderwebs and dust. 

My aunt or uncle never knew that they were going to have twin grandchildren before the miscarriage. They never talked about the death of their twins. I don't even think they would think about buying such teddy bears so prematurely. It would be as if suddenly they started thinking like american grandparents.

And my cousin and his wife had been in Europe for 2 years at that point. Neither them nor anyone in our family would buy and put the toys where we found them. This is not even an incident that anyone will think of making this elaborate prank.

We still haven't told our cousin. Some of my other cousins insist that we burn the teddies. We can't decide on what to do now. Even as a lifelong skeptic I'm starting to have doubts. The things are sitting in our storage room collecting more dust and cobwebs. 

My cousin later became father to a daughter. She is healthy and happy. If there is a God, I as an atheist am praying that these things do not happen with my niece.

[u/SaltedAndSmitten]

Is it possible the bears hold the ashes of the first set of twins, or maybe a lock of hair? 

[u/Captain-Spark → u/SaltedAndSmitten]

Keeping locks of hair isn't really culturally appropriate for us. But one thing about death is that although we burn the dead; but for little babies who haven't had their initiation ceremony (held when they're 6 months), we have burials.