Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them

by Sallie Tisdale

  Ashes can be scattered (almost anywhere, but watch the wind), buried, or kept in a jar on the shelf. But you can also have Mom made into stained glass. Mail yourself to a good friend; the United States Postal Service doesn’t mind. Be made into a matched set of 240 pencils. (Talk about writing a life story.) Stuff a teddy bear. You can become an hourglass. (“They cannot be exactly timed, due to the consistency of the cremains.”) Get added to an artificial coral reef. Be compressed into a diamond. Be mixed in with tattoo ink or paint. Be pressed into a vinyl record. You can mix Dad into fireworks. And you can load your father into shotgun shells, which is advertised by the Holy Smoke company in Alabama as being “eco-friendly.” The bullets can be made in “almost any caliber or gauge of ammunition” so your family can “honor” you by shooting your ashes at “sporting clays or live birds.” You can “have the peace of mind of knowing that you can continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone.”

  Nigel Barley reports that “a museum colleague has decreed that his ashes shall be flung in the eyes of the Trustees of the British Museum.”

  I live in a coastal state, and a lot of people here think about burial at sea. (Preferably a Viking funeral, the burning boat bobbing slowly out with the tide, flames over sea until the boat sinks and the body is carried away.) Sea burial is usually more complicated and expensive than earth burial. The body must be ferried out at least three miles to international waters, weighted, and dropped into a depth of at least six hundred feet. A fair amount of paperwork is required. If you are a veteran or the spouse of a Navy or Coast Guard veteran, burial at sea is free, but the paperwork is complicated and the scheduling is slow. Slow as in months, pending the position of ships and their maneuvers.

  Margaret Drabble is in her late seventies now and making plans. She has asked to be cremated and “not buried in the cold earth.” She wonders about sea burial: “The thought of being devoured underwater is strangely attractive to me, but I think it’s hard to arrange, and I won’t want to be a nuisance.” I want to tell Drabble that sea burial is quite a nuisance, and that if she dislikes the cold ground, she won’t be happy with the sea. Decomposition goes faster in warm water than in soil. But in cold water—which is all there is at six hundred feet—bodies go through fairly dramatic chemical changes that most people will find at least as distressing as ordinary decomposition, and they are not exactly devoured, at least not in a timely way. The government of India releases thousands of turtles into the Ganges every year to help eat the remains of all those bodies.

  The word resomation is taken from the Greek resomer, meaning “rebirth of the body.” It is also sometimes called biocremation. One of the funeral homes offering this in the United States prefers the term dissolution, which resonates for me. The body is quickly reduced to ash through a process known as alkaline hydrolysis. The chemical reaction is similar to what happens to a buried body, but, as with cremation, it happens very fast. Alkaline hydrolysis has long been used to dispose of dead livestock; it is used by a few medical schools to dispose of cadavers when they are no longer useful for research. The body is placed into a closed drum. Instead of fire, the body is bathed in water and potassium hydroxide and heated to around 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Over a period of a few hours, the flesh and organs are reduced to liquid. The cleaned skeleton becomes powdery and can be crushed into ash. Resomation is much cleaner than cremation, uses significantly less fuel, and releases no mercury vapor. Such an unexpected melding of water and fire—fire without flame.

  A Scottish company called Resomation Ltd developed the technology for human funerals. It is currently available in several locations in the United Kingdom and legal in nine American states. Legislation is pending in six more, not counting a number of exceptions already in place for medical schools. When the first funeral home in the United States started offering resomation, the founder of the company told a reporter, “Let’s face it—there’s no nice way to go. You have to go from what looks like a human person to ash and bone, whether you get there by flame or decomposition.

  “If you stood in front of a cremation, with the flames and heat, it seems violent. You go next door and the resomation is quiet. It’s stainless steel and clinical and sterile. It seems nicer.” Perhaps not exactly nice; the liquid left over may come to as much as a hundred gallons. In many cases, the liquid is considered safe for sewer systems and perhaps even agriculture, but in other cases the pH is too high.

  I feel comfortable with the idea of my body decomposing. I don’t believe that “I” will experience this in any way—back to Epicurus and his nothing to fear. I’ve certainly seen my body change in dramatic ways over sixty years. Eight years old, chasing a lizard in the high, dry grass of the hills above town. Pregnant. Bench-pressing my own weight. Recovering from surgery. I’ve been small and big, strong and weak, smooth and textured. I’ve lost parts of my body and other parts are damaged; a few parts have been fixed and others shored up against time. The idea that this body will gradually disintegrate altogether seems obvious. But resomation, which is simply the same process happening quickly, is a little weird. Would I want a bottle of fluid, a jar of you, sloshing and heavy? But you and I are mostly fluid, after all. Resomation liquid is not kindred to bone but to the smoke and vapor of cremation. That I can be turned into slurry and ash in a few hours can only be a spur to self-reflection. And the jar of you or me won’t pollute the planet; we can water the plants instead.

  The Swedish company Promessa invented the technique they call Promession, in which the body is cryogenically frozen at –320 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the entire body into crystal. When the body is vibrated, it dissolves into tiny crystalline particles. The particles are gathered and freeze-dried, removing the remaining water. The dried particles are then treated to remove metals such as mercury. According to the company, a 155-pound body will leave 44 pounds of crystals. If they are buried in a biodegradable container at a shallow depth, the remains decompose into soil in six to eighteen months.

  I felt like I’d come across something new when I heard about Promession. It’s a bit technically demanding—not exactly do-it-yourself like natural burial—but may be the most aesthetically pleasing body disposal method around, a fairly clean way to get people to stop using formaldehyde and 18-gauge steel, or millions of BTUs. Right now it is legal only in Sweden and Scotland, but Promessa has partnered with people around the world and is offering training in the hope that more countries will approve the technology.

  You can donate your entire body for research or education. You can donate just your brain, which is especially useful for research into dementia, no matter what your cognitive state was at the time of death. In some states, an unclaimed body may be claimed by a medical school, a university, or even an individual physician for dissection and research. (This includes prisoners, historically the most common source of cadavers.) Cadaveric tissue is used in countless ways. Whole cadavers are used to teach anatomy, but the uses of a whole cadaver are manifold: studying the efficacy of helmets, testing new surgical procedures, designing a new space capsule. The Army uses cadavers for research into “impacts, blasts, ballistics testing, crash testing and other destructive forces.” If you can imagine a use for a cadaver, it’s probably true.

  Whole-body donation needs to be done well in advance, and every medical school has its own policy. Don’t forget osteopathic and chiropractic colleges, which tend to go wanting. A school can reject a donated body if it’s not appropriate. My local medical school requires bodies to weigh between 100 and 200 pounds and to be free of HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The body must not have been autopsied or have extensive trauma. Bodies and parts are cremated or resomated and the remains returned to families, usually within three years. But once a corpse is dissected or used in experiments, it may be seen to have value and thus become property. No one owns a body, exactly, and bodies can’t make wishes or have rights, but tissue, once used in research, occupies another position.
Everything from cells to anatomical specimens can be claimed.

  You can opt to have your body displayed. The whole body or its parts can be preserved for a classroom or museum exhibit. The most pristine way to do this is plastination. It’s a new method, but an old idea—an ideal, in fact. Anatomists have tried to preserve bodies in various ways for centuries using honey, tanning, alcohol, or the injection of fixatives. Lifelike models of dissected bodies have also been made for hundreds of years, many from wax molded onto real skeletons. Plastination is the zenith of this effort to preserve and display a body in the most exact way possible. The corpse undergoes a complex process involving embalming, dissection, an acetone bath, freezing, and then a polymer bath and hardening. (This is not a particularly eco-friendly practice.) The result of plastination is one of the odder objects in the world: an anatomically precise specimen that is only fractionally organic. A body that both is and is not a body.

  Plastination is still quite controversial, and the displays have been banned in several places. (The use of the bodies of prisoners from China was widely criticized, and the company states it has made changes to avoid this. At this time, the German headquarters for Body Worlds states that they have a list of more than thirteen thousand volunteer donors.) “The preservation of human bodies by plastination converts humans into objects,” writes Catherine Belling, a literature and medicine scholar. She calls such models “metameat,” a “hybrid” thing with “the genetic properties of flesh and the inedible staying power of polyurethane.” Belling is particularly bothered by this “inedible” quality: the body turned into an inorganic object. She wants the body to decompose, to be, as it were, eaten.

  Tarris Rosell, a professor of theology, is disturbed by the models’ apparent activity. Plastinated bodies are positioned running or throwing, bending and twisting. “They are the playing or working dead, perpetually posed without repose, positioned without disposition,” he writes. “For those who subscribe to an ethics of bodily repose, this treatment of human corpses is morally repugnant.”

  I saw the Body Worlds exhibit several years ago at the local science museum. It was stunning and spooky and beautiful. A head had been stripped of everything but its circulatory system, and the arteries, veins, and capillaries wove in an intricate tangle as dense as delicate crochet. Bodies taken down to muscle revealed the precise tension of ligaments, the leverage of weight on the rope of tendon and bone. The model of a man held his own skin in his hand, presenting it to the world—an image created by anatomical modelers for centuries. I was moved by the exhibit, especially taken as a whole: rooms filled with human movement, humans posed and humans looking at humans posed, biological wonder seen by an audience wondering in its own biology. I felt gratitude.

  The mortician and poet Thomas Lynch wants to be buried. He knows what he wants his funeral to look like: “I want a mess made in the snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forgo the tent.” He tells those who will come to mourn to “stand openly to the weather,” and suggests that it would be good if they were cold. “See it to the very end. Avoid the temptation of tidy leave taking.” Lynch took the title of this essay, “Tract,” from a poem by William Carlos Williams, in which Williams gives instructions for a funeral. He explains what the hearse and driver should look like, how they should move. He prescribes an old cart, a single horse, a muddy road. He tells the mourners,

  Go with some show

  of inconvenience;

  11

  Grieving

  We are left with the impulse. You reach for a glass that isn’t there, and your hand swishes through empty air. You step down and the stair is missing and you stumble into space. Grief is the frozen moment when you pat your pocket for your keys, the pocket where you always put your keys, and your keys aren’t there. The intensely familiar is gone—not just a person, but a habit. Gone. When I do this, that happens. When I say this, you answer. When I reach for you, there you are. And then I am reaching, and nothing, nothing is there. The true has become false.

  Grief is disruption. The sound of a footstep on the porch evokes the old world, the other life, and it is only the mail carrier and the new life rushes back. My mother has been gone from my life for more than thirty years, but I hear her voice sometimes when I talk, and I see her in the mirror now and then—sidelong, unexpected glances. There she is. And I think, I should call Mom and tell her about that. Grief recurs and spins, a Möbius strip of memory going on and on in a loop. You aren’t in denial about the death. You just keep remembering that it happened.

  I had spoken to Carol on Christmas Eve. Two days later I had to go to work. A heavy snowfall, the same storm that had kept me from visiting Carol before the holiday, had closed the clinic. Tony, the doctor, and I were doing home visits in his pickup. My cell phone rang as we were parking in front of a patient’s home. I saw Carol’s name on the screen and picked up quickly and said hello.

  “We lost her,” David said. And this didn’t make sense for a moment: She’s right there. What are you talking about? He started to explain—the difficulty, the trip through the snow, the emergency room. I stepped out of the truck and fell down in the snow.

  Until that day, until I felt the violence of this pain, the way it seemed to shred my skin, I didn’t quite know that one really does collapse. I hadn’t felt it with my mother; she’d been unconscious for days and I’d anticipated her death for a long time and so the collapse was a slow one. I had time to reach back and find a chair, as it were. I think of our long line of ancestors, name after name into an almost infinite past. I imagine them gurgling and loosening their hold on the furs in the candlelight, or dropping like a stone while chopping wood. I imagine the collapse, the shock, the sorrowful people preparing them for the soil and the fire. Sometimes I feel the naked commonness of our species. I knelt in the snow, holding the phone, and saying, “What? What?” Tony looking at me.

  You flinch. You know it will hurt and you know it will hurt for a long time. You touch it like an abscessed tooth and skid away. Grief lives in the body. MRI studies show that a grieving brain has a pattern unlike other emotions. Most of the time, an emotion lights up parts of the brain, but grief is distributed everywhere, into areas associated with memory, metabolism, visual imagery, and more. Grief can make you sick; it can be brutal, even deadly. One is coming to grips with what forever means. And we don’t do that all at once and we don’t do it one day at a time but for one minute and then another minute and then another. Don’t ever say: Get over it, move on. She’s in a better place now.

  Grief is full of surprises. Anything is possible. You may feel unreal, drugged. Numbness is one of the most common sensations. You may be calm or excited or enraged. You may be so relieved, relieved that it’s over, the illness, the injury, the weeks and months that turned into a waiting room in which no one’s number was ever called. Then you are overwhelmed with guilt for feeling relieved. It’s all very confusing: hard, difficult work. Work! No one tells you that grief is like a long march in bad weather. You’re forgetful and find it hard to make decisions and have no interest in the decisions you are being asked to make. You lose track of time, because time changes, too, shifting and slowing, speeding up, stopping altogether. An hour becomes an elastic, outrageously delicate thing, disappearing or stretching beyond comprehension. One is deranged, in the truest sense of the word: everything arranged has come apart.

  In grief, I have baked a cake in the middle of the afternoon and left out the sugar and not been able to figure out why it tasted so bad. I have watched a lot of television and stayed up very late and had many strange dreams that evaporated in the morning light. I have awoken each morning to the shock renewed, to think, He died. She died. Decades of Buddhist practice and many hours at the bedsides of the dying, and all that these have given me in my weeks of acute grief is not acceptance but awareness of not accepting. I can see my disbelief for what it is. I think, He died, and then take a deep breath and reset my compass to th
is new world. This new world in which a person who had immense influence on my life does not exist. This vacuum. I am dead, too; the me that lived in the other world, the world where she was, died. The me who knew instinctively where he was and suffered a little when he was far away died. Who am I now? All the possibilities of the life of that former me, the me-with-her, are extinguished. Grieving, one is thrust into a new life—an unwelcome life. It takes time for that life to become familiar, to feel like the life you are actually living. You can be happy again, but you can never be happy and the same again.

  A friend of mine called the numbness that falls over you immediately after a death “like swimming in thick gelatin mixed with cotton candy and filled with webs and you’re trying to push it aside and you can’t push it aside.” You may not remember much of the days after a death. I remember little about my mother’s funeral, though I did a lot of the organizing. I remember the fight my brother and sister had afterward, the casseroles on the dining table. But I don’t remember how we got the church ready or if there were flowers or what my father did that day or what I wore. I remember sitting in the back yard late that night, drinking bourbon with her friend Hutch, the music teacher who had been my bandleader in middle school. We were drinking and watching the stars, and I was so tired. Nothing will be the same, I thought, leaning back in the chaise longue as though into a pool, sinking into the warm dark night. I remember that.