Drinking to the dead

[flexagon]

Well... I'm done now with Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, and think it's worth another post since it's actually changed my decision about what I want done with my body after I die. Something about it... well, first, I never realized how useful a human cadaver is. There are injury studies that simply can't be undertaken in a productive way without them, and of course there's very little that compares to them for the teaching of anatomy students. Others are used to train dogs that are used to find murder victims, calibrate shock-test dummies to help car companies make safer cars, to help design non-lethal bullets, and to analyze what happened in plane crashes. Some rot under controlled conditions to study that process so that forensic experts can know more and more accurately how long someone has been dead. Countless others donate organs, saving the lives (or just the vision or whatever) of other people who can now use what they are not using. In Sweden, there's even a large movement afoot to start simply using human bodies for compost (there's a freeze-drying process involved), to allow a growing plant at least to benefit.

bluechromis, I should mention that while the first few chapters of the book are absolutely delightful (and insanely funny) and the last chapter gets back around to the same if you like environmentalism and the compost idea, there's some stuff in the middle that veers off into some animal experimentation you may find very hard to read about. It was important stuff, true... it was one of the first steps to recognizing that life is centered in the head and that brain death should be the legal definition of "death", which is useful in all kinds of ways. Still it was hard to read about, and not very human-cadaver-centric. It can be skipped without losing much of the book's message.

Maybe it was something about reading all these different uses all at once, but... a week ago, if I knew I was dying I would have said to just cremate me. But then, really... my body the object. I've put so much work into it for reasons that have mostly been selfish but aren't necessarily so. This could be good for someone else someday! Don't get me wrong, I'm going to use it any which way I want until I'm well and truly through with it--but say I died tomorrow and left my cadaver as it would be right now. It would be criminal to not use my hair for a wig for a cancer victim, silly to waste my heart (down in the 50s for beats per minute when resting) when someone is dying without a replacement. Same for my liver: I don't drink much, I bet it's in pretty boss shape. If I didn't die and leave a beating-heart cadaver, which is what you need for organ transplants, it would seem reasonable enough to help a medical student learn anatomy (which is how 80% of bodies "donated to science" end up) or to help with someone's experiment somewhere. Cadavers are treated with more respect today than ever before, and to be selfish for a moment, it's a lot less nasty to be dissected than to decay right off the bat. No, if I have to decay, the explicit "compost" option is sounding much more appealing.

I've never liked the idea of burial, because I don't want to make claim to a patch of land like that for no reason (plus the rotting thing rears its ugly head again). But I never thought before about the sheer waste of cremation. Am I weird to have not thought of these things before? What do you want done with your bodies when you die, and why?

I am embarrassed now that I was squicked out by organ donation when I was younger, when the truth is that I might do more good that way, dead, than I have so far to anyone while alive. Not that I'm done trying.