In the tomb of the Younger Lady, they debate her body. She is the mother of King Tut, and his father's cousin, or sister, or half-sister. The father in question is likely called Akhenaten, and she is called KV35YL, or Younger Lady. Her hair is untraceable, and there are sizable cavities in her essence. She has been mistaken for a man even in her mummified state. Researchers, scientists, and archaeologists discuss her cause of death and either it is violence by animal or violence by man. She is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, wherein it costs 550 EGP to see her on display.
Although she lived thousands of years ago, the Younger Lady is witness to the lives of all prominent women. She lived, married, mothered, and died untimely. History cares little more for anything else.
In her story, they seldom mention anything she was buried with (linen, flowers, her mother), instead opting to focus on the importance: what man was she related to, was she married, who did she bore that changed the nation?
After death, history tries (knowingly or otherwise) to convince the world that women simply stop existing as a feasible human being. Instead, they become two dimensional creatures capable only of having a family, or not.
Living in the twenty-first century, women of many classes, races, and nations have unprecedented levels of ability to not simply be what is expected, but instead to be what is wanted. The unshakable freedom of doing what she wants rather than what her ancestors had no choice but to. The ability to die as anything other than the status quo.
That is not to say that women were never anything but wives; alternatively, they now have the capability to be open with what they do and who they are and have it written down without worry of modesty or lineage. Amelia Earhart, Marie Sklowdowska-Curie, and Malala Yousafzai are all women who are known for what they have done for humanity, not only what they married for it.
In this modern age, we are at the lucky time where we can fight to be known for the inventions we create, the solutions we birth, and the lengths to which we went to obtain it. As a woman myself, I have had to walk into rooms wondering if I'll be understood if my hair was buzzed, if there was a crater in my chest, and a man by my side. Still, I have continued knowing that it would not be the end of me, that there would be more tribulations and divergences before admission. When I die, I will linger as whatever I choose to be known as and it will be women such as the Younger Lady who have made it possible.
Still, drive and confidence needs to be encouraged even though we have a fraction of acknowledgement, for there is no stopping until every woman has the berth to set sail her own future, and be written down in every history book for it.
Thus, to be a woman dead means to be an archetype of life itself.
The girls are talking. Get in the conversation.