I would happily donate my organs as teaching tools, but unless I move to Michigan or some other state with a plastination lab, I can’t. I could ask my loved ones to ship me to Michigan, but that would be silly. Besides, you can’t specify what happens to you when you donate your remains to science, only what doesn’t happen. The dead people whose parts Glover and Corcoran have plastinated over the years checked a box on their University of Michigan donor form indicating that they did not object to “permanent preservation,” but they didn’t request it specifically.
Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you’re gone—of still being there, in a sense. I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s none of their business what happens to them when they die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to.
Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to. McCabe’s policy is to honor the wishes of the family over the wishes of the dead. Willed body program coordinators feel similarly. “I’ve had kids object to their dad’s wishes [to donate],” says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “I tell them, ‘Do what’s best for you. You’re the one who has to live with it.’”
I saw this happen between my father and mother. My father, who rejected organized religion early in his life, asked my mother to have him cremated in a plain pine box and to hold no memorial service. My mother, against her Catholic inclinations, honored his wishes. She later regretted it. People she barely knew confronted her about their disappointment over there having been no memorial service. (My father had been a beloved character around town.) My mother felt shamed and slandered. The urn was a further source of discomfort, partly because the Catholic Church insists on burial of remains, even cremated ones, and partly because she didn’t like having it around the house. Pop sat in a closet for a year or two until one day, with no word to my brother or me, she brought him down to the Rand Funeral Home, pushed aside her guilt, and had the urn buried in a cemetery plot beside the one she’d reserved for herself. Initially, I had sided with my father and was indignant over her disrespect of his stated request. When I realized how distressing his last wishes had been for her, I changed my mind.
If I donated my body to science, my husband, Ed, would have to picture me on a lab table and, worse, picture all the things that might be done to me there. Many people would be fine with this. But Ed is squeamish about bodies, living or dead. This is a man who refuses to wear contacts because he’d have to touch his eyes. I have to limit my visits to the Surgery Channel for evenings when he’s out of town. When I told him I was thinking about joining the Harvard Brain Bank a couple years back, he started shaking his head: “Ix-nay on the ainbank-bray.”
Whatever Ed wants to do with me is what will be done with me. (The exception being organ donation. If I wind up brain-dead with usable parts, someone’s going to use them, squeamishness be damned.) If Ed goes first, only then do I fill out the willed body form.
And if do, I will include a biographical note in my file for the students who dissect me (you can do this), so they can look down at my dilapidated hull and say, “Hey, check this. I got that woman who wrote a book about cadavers.” And if there’s any way I can arrange it, I’ll make the thing wink.
Acknowledgements
People who work with cadavers do not, as a general rule, enjoy the spotlight. Their work is misunderstood and their funding vulnerable to negative publicity. What follows is a group of people who had every reason not to return my calls, yet did. Commander Marlene DeMaio, Colonel John Baker, and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Harris, I salute your candor. Deb Marth, Albert King, John Cavanaugh, and the staff of the Wayne State impact lab, thank you for opening doors that don’t often get opened. Rick Lowden, Dennis Shanahan, Arpad Vass, and Robert White, thank you for being charming and endlessly patient while I asked inane questions and used up entire afternoons of your time.
For helping make impossible things possible, I must thank the miraculous Sandy Wan, John Q. Owsley, Von Peterson, Hugh Patterson, and my pal Ron Walli. An especially warm thank-you to Susanne Wiigh-Masak and her family for putting up with me (and putting me up) for three days and nights. For sharing their time and tremendous knowledge, I thank Cindy Bir, Key Rey Chong, Dan Corcoran, Art Dalley, Nicole D’Ambrogio, Tim Evans, Roy Glover, John T. Greenwood, Don Huelke, Paul Israel, Gordon Kaye, Tyler Kress, Duncan MacPherson, Aris Makris, Theo Martinez, Kevin McCabe, Mack McMonigle, Bruce Latimer, Mehmet Oz, Terry Spracher, Jack Springer, Dennis Tobin, Ronn Wade, Mike Walsh, Med-O Whitson, Meg Winslow, and Frederick Zugibe.
A big hug to Jeff Greenwald for the support and martinis, to Laura Fraser for her unflagging enthusiasm, and to Steph Gold, who spent three days of her summer vacation with me in Haikou, China, when almost anywhere else would have been more fun. I thank Clark for being Clark, Lisa Margonelli for making me laugh when all was darkest, and Ed for loving a woman who writes about cadavers.
Special thanks must go to David Talbot, brave and brilliant founder of Salon.com, for getting the ball rolling, and to my smart and outrageously good agent, Jay Mandel. To my editor, the gifted poet and novelist Jill Bialosky, thank you endlessly for your patience, vision, and editorial grace. Every writer should be so fortunate.
And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.
Bibliography
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Hunt, Tony. The Medieval Surgery. Rochester: Boydell Press, 1992.
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Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Wolfe, Richard J. Robert C. Hinckley and the Recreation of the First Operation Under Ether. Boston: Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 1993.
Bailey, James Blake. The Diary of a Resurrectionist. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1896.