But ever since I found out from my mom that our family has space on their burial plot in South Carolina for myself and my sister, I have been thinking about what I really want to have happen after I die. I went back to SC with my mom for her 50th High School reunion and we made a little side trip to the cemetery attached to our family's old Presbyterian church. We found my grandmother's new headstone and as we made our way back to the car, my mom pointed to a couple of spaces next to our grandparents. "There's your space and then your sister's" It is a nice place, rolling hills, big shady trees, and cicadas buzzing in the background.
A few months later the subject came up again, (our family is the kind of Southerners who say things like; "I hope we have some good weather so we can enjoy Daddy's funeral", but will refer to any part of the body between the navel and the knees as "down there") and casually my mother said something about my sister donating her organs and thus not being buried in her assigned space. She rambled on to something else, but I wanted to hit the rewind button. What does that mean? Don't you still get to have a final resting place, albeit minus your liver and kidneys? Are Presbyterians like the ancient Egyptians, convinced that one cannot enter the afterlife unless one's body is intact? And what if you decided to be cremated? Does that earn you a snub in the Beyond as well?
So these were the kinds of things running in the back of my mind as I read "Stiff". It actually was not as high on the "gross-out scale" as I had feared, but there were a couple of passages where I realized I was gripping the book and pressing myself back into my seat as if trying to ward off what I was reading. Suffice to say, I am really glad to be born in the 20th century. And I now know what "gibbeting" means well enough to use it in a sentence although I hope I never need to.
The second to last chapter in the book was a revelation. I already knew something about "green funerals" because it was a storyline on "Six Feet Under" and I googled the term and learned that there was even a company in South Carolina that offered the service. My only reservation was that it meant you were buried in a "green" nature preserve and not with your family. I can be fairly superstitious (I don't open umbrellas in the house, I don't kill spiders, and always throw salt over my shoulder if I spill any), and somehow I can't escape the intuition that if there is an afterlife, it would be nice to spend it with my relatives, particularly the ones that I never got the chance to meet while living, who knows, it might be fun. So far "Stiff" had covered the various ways in which peoples' bodies that had been willed to science were used. To be honest, they weren't really appealing to me. Put down whatever you might be eating and imagine your mortal coil being strapped into a "crash sled" in a car safety lab somewhere. Or how about a total stranger sawing off your head so a plastic surgeon can brush up on their eyelid tuck technique? Maybe as I get older I will get less selfish, already I'm not as bad as I was at the age of 2, but if I knew I was going to go tomorrow, I would get in touch with the Promessa people.
A technique that is being promoted in Sweden, where land is scarce and people are so practical that they make the Dutch look like drunken frat brothers on weekend trip to Las Vegas, is human composting. Your remains are frozen with liquid nitrogen, then broken up into small pieces via ultrasound. The resulting powder goes into a vacuum chamber where the remaining water is removed, and on from there to a separator to take out "spare parts" mercury (from your fillings). The end result is that you are now organic powder in a small cornstarch container, ready to be placed in the ground. After your biodegradable "starch coffin" degrades, your powdered form fertilizes a plant. It's got something for everyone. You don't end up decomposing in a big fancy over-priced casket, the mercury in your fillings doesn't end up in the atmosphere from being burned in a crematorium, and you could help grow something, almost like reincarnation. I wouldn't mind coming back as a geranium. And hopefully, I could be planted with the rest of my family, just in a slightly different form.
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