Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them

by Sallie Tisdale

  Which breath is the last one?

  This is our conventional wisdom: that a person is dead when the heartbeat ends and breathing stops. We agree that the time of death for a person on a ventilator is when the machine is turned off and the heart stops—but sometimes we turn the machine off because we believe the brain is dead and there is no person left at all. The body is designed to preserve itself, to continue. When this work stops in such a way that it can’t be started again, when the drive to live—most succinctly framed as a reflexive need to breathe—is gone, we may say a person is dead. The body’s organization as a system of systems is lost. Do we die with the last breath, or the last heartbeat, or the last brain wave? Yes. No. Maybe. Choose. Time of death is as much a social agreement as a clinical one. In Japan, people disagree about how and when a person dies. By law, the patient who is anticipating her death, or a family member making decisions for the patient, can declare their preference for which definition of death will prevail.

  We think of life and death as opposites: opposed to each other, two sides in a battle. They cancel each other out. Perhaps life and death are entirely separate and whole events taking place without regard for the other.

  We die each moment, become new selves each moment. When I am afraid, I know it is this bounded self that fears, the aggregates of body and mind bound together. This irreplaceable self. The insights I’ve had into the heaving sea of change are like the iris of the eye snapping open all the way for an instant. Such insights give us a glimpse of how things fit together. What I’ve experienced in such moments is so similar to experiences described by people of different religions or no religious faith at all that it would be foolish to claim them for a belief system. The words we choose are like coloring, like the scribbles of crayons on the surface of a sphere; it is the sphere with which we are concerned. As we approach the moment of death, all our underlying beliefs are starkly outlined. Our sense of what a human life encompasses—the room a human being takes up in the world, and whether there is something greater or everlasting beyond human life—is framed in a stark light. I stand now on a ground of fearlessness altogether different from the anxieties of my ambitious youth. The poet Marie Howe imagines the moment of death not as an ending, the halting of something, but as a point of completion. A totaling of a life. The eternal memory of the tired satisfaction at the end of a good day, a satisfaction never before known: At last / someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone. I am not who I was fifty years ago, or ten years ago, or last year, or yesterday. I am not the person who wrote this sentence. Which of me will die? This moment in which everything, everything, everything changes at once is one of great mystery, great power, like no other moment in all of time.

  10

  Bodies

  A person is not just a body; a person has a body,” writes the philosopher Daniel Dennett. “That corpse is the body of dear old Jones, a Center of Narrative Gravity.” Why does it matter what we do with a body, knowing that the person no longer exists? Or doesn’t exist in the sense of proximal intentionality—so why would the body have meaning? Yet it does, it always does; whether we cling to it or flee it, what happens to the emptied body feels momentous. As long as we will continue to live, we will remember what happened to the body of the one who died. Dennett thinks we have to care for dead bodies, because to do otherwise threatens the living. “The boundaries of Jones are not identical to the boundaries of Jones’s body,” he writes. Jones is not here anymore; in a relationship, we are in a kind of ceaseless conversation with each other, and that conversation is done. But the corpse is still part of the story, even if it isn’t part of the telling. “If we start treating corpses as garbage, for instance,” writes Dennett, “it might change the way we treat near-corpses—those who are still alive but dying.” The corpse is a mirror; we are its reflection.

  The range of attitudes toward the corpse are as varied as humankind, but whatever is done, it carries the weight of a ritual object. In many societies, the disposal of the body depends on the status of the dead person. Australian Aboriginal culture has a number of rules about how and when and by whom a corpse is touched. The dead one is given a death name, called a necronym. Cannibalism is considered a sign of respect in certain societies. On the island of Sulawesi, families keep the body of a dead relative for several years while it slowly mummifies. The body is dressed, given a plate of food at the table, perhaps a cigar or glass of liquor now and then. Even after the mummy is entombed, the coffins are sometimes opened so the clothes can be changed. We can eat the body in little candy skulls on the Day of the Dead, shouting and singing behind our masks, controlling death by digesting it. One culture brings flowers to the graves of loved ones and carves their names in stone; another culture avoids graves at all costs. One builds mausoleums for expensive coffins and another ceremoniously tosses the bodies off a cliff.

  Even within a society, people make diametrically opposite choices about how to dispose of the dead. In the modern West, one family keeps the ashes on the mantel, next to the photographs; the other family cleans out the closets and paints the bedroom as soon as the funeral is over. One person applies to be a plastinated model, and another considers it a gross, irreligious display.

  The “fuzzy” ambiguity right after death is expressed in many ways. In Shinto belief, a dead person is ambiguous: still human but unlike the living. He has become an infant again in important ways. Soon after death, a close relative touches the corpse’s lips with a wet cloth, a double-edged symbol: the offering is a final effort to revive the person and, at the same time, proof that he is dead. In Jewish tradition, the eyes and mouth of the dead are closed and the body is covered with a sheet. The windows are opened, the mirrors are covered, and the body is never left unattended. Jewish funeral homes offer the services of a shomer, who watches over the body prior to the funeral. The shomer doesn’t eat or drink in the presence of the corpse; such behavior is considered mocking, because the dead cannot do these things.

  There is usually no need to hurry to move a body. Changes happen over hours and days, not minutes. American law generally allows you to leave a body in place for at least twenty-four hours. A hospital may give you much less time, but that’s as much convention as anything else. Ask for more time. Tell the nurse you’re not ready. They will charge you another night’s rent eventually, but you don’t have to go, especially if you have religious obligations. You don’t have to do anything for a long time, and then you can do it your way. (The one thing you have to do is register the death according to the local laws.)

  Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem called Corpse Washing: “And one without a name lay / there, bare and cleansed, and gave commands.” Washing a body is an act of submission. We surrender to the fact of death. There is no need to do this, but bathing a body is an almost universal act, the instinctive response of grief, and it feels as though something is being done for all of us when we do.

  Many Japanese die at home. The traditional Shinto way of caring for a dead body is called nōkan, or “encoffinment,” practiced by artisans known as nōkanshi. In Japan, dead bodies were long considered impure, and this was a vital but low occupation. The nōkanshi prepares the body while the family watches. The entire corpse is wiped clean under draping, taking care for modesty and never exposing the body to view. Facial hair is shaved and then makeup applied, to both men and women. Done correctly, encoffinment has all the Japanese virtues of proportion and precise movement, coupled with the blunt fact of what lies before you. The clothes are folded with intention, the hands posed carefully, the facial expression arranged just so. At the end of the ritual, the body is carefully lifted and placed in the coffin. Younger people seem less concerned with impurity these days, and encoffinment has been somewhat rebelliously revived as a profession. There is a small nōkanshi competition at the annual Life Ending Industry Expo in Japan to see who can do this most beautifully.

  Take your time. Washing a body is difficult to do alone
, and why should we? Share the experience. A dead body, deflated, shrunken, feels somehow heavier than a living one. It is awkward to move. If you have ever felt the weight of a sleeping person, know that this weight isn’t the same. Even a person sound asleep carries his own body with the tension of living muscle. A dead body has no tension at all; it is sand, water, stone.

  Go slowly. Lay down towels or pads first, as the bladder and bowels may drain when the body is moved. This is the easiest way to move a dead body: two or more people on each side roll the sheet up tightly against the body and slide and lift together. Be prepared for the body to sigh or groan; when you turn a body, the last air is released from the lungs. Take your time, take a deep breath. Think it through. We know how to hold a baby, how to hold each other, and we know how to hold a body.

  We are exquisitely tuned to the sensation of another’s skin, to the texture and warmth of living skin. Skin is the largest organ in the body; when we touch each other, we are touching a vital organ. A corpse’s skin will not feel like this. Under living skin is a continual humming pulse of moving blood and dividing cells, a vibration of electrical signals in the muscles, the shiver of nerve response. Dead skin is inelastic and fragile at once. A corpse may appear to sweat and feel clammy. The body temperature drops by almost two degrees Fahrenheit every hour after death, in a process called algor mortis.

  The beloved lies before you, completely revealed. All of aging, every success and every injury, the ragged ending of illness or trauma, all of the lived life, is revealed: the farmer’s tan lines; the sparse, unevenly shaved legs; the hysterectomy scar and pregnancy stretch marks; the callused heels and poorly cut toenails; arthritic knuckles and the roots of gray hair at the bottom of the dye. We spend our lives wishing our bodies were different than they are: younger, stronger, bigger, thinner, curvier, prettier, taller, different. The point comes when you find out what you already know about the people you love. Concealment is gone, disguise is yanked away, and so are all our efforts at disguise and our shallow desire to be disguised, our yearning to be seen as other than we are. Everything shows. Should we be surprised by what we see? This is time: the roughened, slumping body. When we see another exactly as he is, exactly as she is, we see how much alike we are. Love is really the only possible response. You need warm, wet cloths and love. Love is useful here.

  Wash the body and dress it. The body may ooze fluid afterward, so if the clothing being put on is important, start with an incontinent pad or brief, or wrap a towel around the genitals. When you are done bathing and dressing, move the body into the desired position. Rigor mortis starts within a few hours after death, with chemical changes in the muscle cells. This happens more quickly in the cold, and if a person was working hard just before dying. Rigor starts with involuntary muscles: the bowel, heart, bladder and other organs. Rigor then spreads to the head and neck, stiffening the jaw and eyelids, and then into the trunk and limbs. If the body has begun to stiffen, move the limbs with slow, steady pressure. If you want to cross the arms over the chest or put the hands together, you may need to bind them gently with cloth, or interlace the fingers. Roll a small towel under the neck to support the head. Place a clean cloth or gauze pad over the eyes. This can be gently taped in place or held down by a small bag of rice or other light weight. Dentures may be difficult to place or remove. If the lower jaw won’t close, roll a washcloth into a tube and place it under the chin. You can also use a scarf, being careful to smooth out all wrinkles. Place the scarf on the head and wrap it gently around the chin and tie on top. Leave the scarf and eye bag in place for a few hours and the body will set in this posture.

  You may want a photograph. In the small town where I grew up, we had two cemeteries: the big city cemetery where my relatives were buried, and a small traditional Catholic cemetery on a hill. My friends and I hiked up there now and then to look at the gravestones. Each had a pair of photographs, side-by-side images of the person alive and the person in a coffin, a practice I found spooky and exciting. (Recalling this, I think those photographs are the first real images of dead people that I ever saw.) Once, photos of the dead dressed and posed as though alive were prized. Many people still make death masks, or a model of a loved one’s hands, or art from their hair, teeth, or fingernails. Now is the time to take a memento—a memento mori, the Latin for “Remember, you must die.”

  When Butch died, we cleaned him up and laid him straight. After everyone had taken their time to say goodbye—several hours, as I remember—we called the service and two men in black suits came in the soft afternoon sun. They slid him onto the stretcher and tucked a sheet around him and belted the body in tight. Then the older man asked, “Would he want sunshine on his face, or not?” And we all said at once, “Sunshine.” They left his face exposed and carried him away, tilting the stretcher up on the outside steps so that he faced the sun one last time.

  These were nice men, and I am glad for that memory. But you can take the body to a mortuary or crematorium by yourself. People have been known to dress a body and strap it into the passenger seat with a rakish hat on for the ride. How about a motorcycle sidecar? An important thing to know about disposing of a body is that you do not need to use a funeral home. You don’t have to have a funeral. You do not need to use a hearse or a coffin. You can speak to cemeteries and crematoriums directly and prepare the body yourself. You don’t need pallbearers, but the reason six strong men may be required is the coffin. Most bodies can be carried by four women. Biodegradable coffins are light and can be carried with straps, and many shrouds have handles for this purpose. In some cemeteries, you can dig the grave yourself.

  As long as you are following local law, you can bury the body on your own land. This is often an entirely personal choice requiring no contact with authorities. (Local ordinances vary. A man in Stevenson, Alabama, buried his wife in his yard according to her wishes and has been fighting exhumation and reburial ever since. So far, she’s still there.)

  You don’t have to do any of the things many people do with dead bodies, but hardly anyone is going to volunteer this information. The Natural Death Centre of the UK advises that if a funeral director tells you that you must do this or that, “you may want to consider choosing another funeral director.”

  Under English common law, no one owns a dead body and a dead body owns nothing: “The only lawful possessor of a corpse is the earth.” Artists have sued to keep embalmed bodies and have both won and lost. Laws about the dead are ever-evolving and contradictory even now.

  In 1905, Georgia Supreme Court justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin II ruled in a case in which a widow sought damages from a train company that had left her husband’s coffin in the rain, resulting in “mutilation” of the corpse. An earlier case had held that the corpse, once buried, belonged to the ground; improperly digging it up would be merely trespass. But another case deemed a corpse “quasi-property,” recognizing that kin have an interest in the corpse even though it belongs to no one. This concept is widely held today; it may be phrased as having the right to “take possession” of the body and dispose of it.

  In the widow’s case, Lumpkin wrote, “Death is unique. It is unlike aught else in its certainty and its incidents. A corpse in some respects is the strangest thing on earth. A man who but yesterday breathed and thought and walked among us has passed away. Something has gone. The body is left still and cold, and is all that is visible to mortal eye of the man we knew. Around it cling love and memory. Beyond it may reach hope. It must be laid away. And the law—that rule of action which touches all human things—must touch also this thing of death. It is not surprising that the law relating to this mystery of what death leaves behind cannot be precisely brought within the letter of all the rules regarding corn, lumber and pig iron.” The court ruled in favor of the widow.

  In France, a dead person can get married in certain circumstances, because a dead person may have rights of a certain kind. A dead body does not have rights, including the right to be buried as the once-liv
ing person had wished to be buried. Only a living person can make a wish. Even so, we should make our wishes known. The person who will decide what will happen to your body is your executor or personal representative. Be sure you choose one who will honor your wishes, and be sure you’ve told them what you want. Your body is the last object for which you can be responsible, and this wish may be the most personal one you ever make. It is an act of kindness not to leave this decision to bereft family members, who may fight among themselves, spend too much money, and collapse in pressured compromise. You have no need to apologize for what you want. Maybe you want to be coiffed and made up; maybe you want to be fed to vultures. Just save those who love you from trying to guess.

  The funeral home (or “death care”) industry has been moving toward economies of scale and massive multinational corporate ownership for decades. (I don’t know exactly what this is telling us about the world, but a robotics team has designed a machine that can wash, dry, and even shroud a body automatically. They designed it in accordance with Islamic law, but are willing to change the plans to “conform to other religions/customs.”)

  The biggest funeral corporation by far is SCI (Service Corporation International, a deliberately meaningless name). SCI owns a huge fraction of the industry, including the brands National Cremation Service, Neptune Society, Dignity Memorial, and Advantage Funeral & Cremation Services. In the last few years, SCI bought its two largest competitors, Alderwoods Group and Stewart Enterprises. Annual revenues are in the billions of dollars, with more than two thousand funeral homes and cemeteries in forty-five US states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. (Buying Stewart Enterprises is forcing SCI to sell off some properties to comply with monopoly laws.) SCI sometimes buys family-run mortuaries in order to trade on respected names; nothing appears to change, not the name or even the staff. If you want to make sure a funeral home or crematorium is the independent local business it appears to be, you have to ask.