Stiff (33 page)

At least in the United States. Not long ago, I called the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the official U.S. mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, to ask its opinion on freeze-drying and composting as an alternative to burial. I was put through to a Monsignor John Strynkowski in the Doctrine office. While the monsignor allowed that composting and nourishing the earth was little different from a Trappist monk's plain shroud burial or a church-sanctioned burial at sea, following which the body will, as he put it, provide nourishment for fish, the idea of composting struck him as disrespectful. I asked him why. "Well, when I was a kid," he answered, "we had a hole where we put peelings from apples and such, and used it for fertilizer. That's just my association."

While I had him on the phone, I asked Monsignor Strynkowski about tissue digestion. He replied with minimal hesitation that the church would be opposed to "the idea of human remains going into the drain."

He explained that the Catholic Church feels that the human body should always be given a dignified burial, whether it's the body itself or the ashes. (Scattering remains a sin.) When I explained that the company planned to add an optional dehydrator to the system that could reduce the liquefied remains to a powder that could then be buried, just as cremains can be, the line went quiet. Finally he said, "I guess that would be okay." You got the feeling Monsignor Strynkowski was looking forward to the end of the phone call.

The line between solid waste disposal and funerary rituals must be well maintained. Interestingly, this is one of the reasons the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate U.S. crematoria. For if it did regulate them, the rules would be promulgated under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act, which covers "Solid Waste Incinerators." And that would mean, explained Fred Porter, of the EPA Emission Standards Division in Washington, "that what we're incinerating at crematoria is 'solid waste.'"

The EPA does not wish to stand accused of calling America's dead loved ones "solid waste."

Wiigh-Masak may succeed in taking composting mainstream because she realizes the importance of keeping respectful disposition distinct from waste disposal, of addressing the family's need for a dignified end. To a certain extent, of course, dignity is in the packaging. When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance. I used to think the traditional navy burial at sea sounded nice; I pictured the sun on the ocean, the infinite expanse of blue, the nowhereness of it.

Then one day I had a conversation with Phillip Backman, during which he mentioned that one of the cleanest, quickest, and most ecologically pure things to do with a body would be to put it in a big tide-pool full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs. "It'll do the thing in a couple of days," he said.

"It's all recycled, and it's all clean and taken care of." My affinity for burial at sea—not to mention crabmeat—was suddenly, dramatically diminished.

Wiigh-Masak finishes speaking, and the group applauds. If they think of her as the enemy, they do a good job of concealing it. On the way out, a photographer asks us to pose with Helsing and a couple of the other executives for the company Web page. We stand with one foot and shoulder forward, arranged in facing columns, like doo-wop backup singers in unusually drab costumes. While I avail myself of a Fonus lint brush, I hear Helsing say that the company plans to add a link to Promessa on its Web site. A wary friendship has been forged.

On the road between Jönköping and Wiigh-Masak's home on Lyrön is a graveyard on a hill. If you drive all the way through to the back of this graveyard, you come to a small field where the church will one day dig more graves. Halfway up the unmown terrain, a small rhododendron bush stands among the weeds. This is the Promessa test grave. Last December, Wiigh-Masak concocted the approximate equivalent of a 150-pound human cadaver, using freeze-dried cow blood and freeze-dried, pulverized bones and meat. She placed the powder in a corn-starch box, and the box in a shallow (thirty-five centimeters down, so the compost could still get oxygen) grave. In June, she will return to dig it up and make sure the container has disintegrated and the contents have begun their metaphysical journey.

Wiigh-Masak and I stand in silence beside the grave of the unknown livestock, as though paying our respects. It's dark now and hard to see the plant, though it appears to be doing well. I tell Wiigh-Masak that I think it's great, this quest for an ecologically sound, meaningful memorial. I tell her I'm rooting for her, then quickly rephrase the sentiment, omitting gardening-related verbs.

And I am. I hope Wiigh-Masak succeeds, and I hope WR2 succeeds. I'm all for choices, in death as in life. Wiigh-Masak is encouraged by my support, as she has been by the support of the Church of Sweden and her corporate backers and the people who have responded positively in the polls. "It was and is," she confides as the wind shimmies the leaves on the cow's memorial shrub, "very important to feel I'm not crazy."

Footnotes:

[
1]
He does not use the word "autopsy," for the prefix denotes a postmortem medical inspection of one's own species. Technically speaking, only a human's investigation of another human's death can be called an autopsy—or, supposing a very different world, a sheep's investigation of another sheep's.

[
2]
In the grand scheme of industrial air pollution, crematoria rank low on the fret list. They emit about half as much particulate matter as a residential fireplace and about as much nitrous oxide as the typical restaurant grill. (This is not surprising, as the human body is mostly water.) Of greatest concern is mercury from dental fillings, which vaporizes and drifts into the atmosphere at a rate of .23 grams per hour of operation (about a half gram per cremation), according to research done jointly by the EPA and the Cremation Association of North America. An independent study done in England in 1990 and published in the journal
Nature
estimated the average amount of mercury released into the atmosphere at three grams per cremation—a notably higher and, the author believed, worrisome total. All in all, compared to power plants and incinerated trash, the dental work of the dead generates a small fraction of the planet's airborne mercury.

[
3]
Frozen humans shatter easily because they are mostly water. How much water is a matter of some debate. A Google search unearthed sixty-four Web sites with the words "body is 70 percent water," 27 sites that say it's 60 percent water, 43 that tell you it is either 80 or 85 percent water, 12

that say the figure is 90 percent, 3 that say it's 98 percent, and one that says it's 91 percent. A better consensus exists for jellyfish. They are either 98 or 99 percent water, and that is why you never see dried jellyfish snacks.

Todd Astorino, director of the Exercise Science Program at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, Maryland, was able to answer the question not only with certainty, but to a decimal point: We are 73.8 percent water.

The figure, he said, is calculated by giving a volunteer a measured quantity of water laced with tracers to drink. Four hours later, the subject's blood is sampled and the dilution of the tracers is noted. From this, you, or Todd anyway, can figure out how much water is in the body.

(The more water in the body, the more diluted the tracers in the blood.) Compare the water weight to body weight, and there's the answer. Isn't science terrific?

[
4]
And sometimes less. My business-grade room at Gothenburg's Landvetter Airport Hotel ("For Flying People") had no clock, the assumption being, I suppose, that a businessman can simply consult his watch. The TV remote had no mute button. I pictured Swedish remote designers arguing quietly in their cleanly appointed conference room.

"But Ingmar, why do you need a special button when you can just put down the volume?"

12

Remains of the Author

Will she or won't she?

It has long been a tradition among anatomy professors to donate their bodies to medical science. Hugh Patterson, the UCSF professor whose lab I visited, looks at it this way: "I've enjoyed teaching anatomy, and look, I get to do it after I die." He told me he felt like he was cheating death.

According to Patterson, the venerable anatomy teachers of Renaissance Padua and Bologna, as death sidled near, would choose their best student and ask him to prepare their skull as an anatomical exhibit. (Should you one day visit Padua, you can see some of these skulls, at the university medical school.)

I don't teach anatomy, but I understand the impulse. Some months back, I gave thought to becoming a skeleton in a medical school classroom.

Years ago I read a Ray Bradbury story about a man who becomes obsessed with his skeleton. He has come to think of it as a sentient, sinister entity that lives inside him, biding its time until he dies and the bones slowly prevail. I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see. I didn't see it becoming my usurper, but more my stand-in, my means to earthly immortality.
I've
enjoyed hanging around in rooms doing nothing much, and look, I get to do it
after I die
. Plus, on the off chance that an afterlife exists, and that it includes the option of home planet visitations, I'd be able to pop by the med school and finally see what my bones looked like. I liked the idea that when I was gone, my skeleton would live on in some sunny, boisterous anatomy classroom. I wanted to be a mystery in some future medical student's head: Who was this woman? What did she do? How did she come to be here?

Of course, the mystery could as easily be engendered by a more routine donation of my remains. Upward of 80 percent of the bodies left to science are used for anatomy lab dissections. Most assuredly, a lab cadaver occupies the thoughts and dreams of its dissectors. The problem, for me, is that while a skeleton is ageless and aesthetically pleasing, an eighty-year-old corpse is withered and dead. The thought of young people gazing in horror and repulsion at my sagging flesh and atrophied limbs does not hold strong appeal. I'm forty-three, and already they're doing it. A skeleton seemed the less humiliating course.

I actually went so far as to contact a facility at the University of New Mexico's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology that accepts bodies specifically to harvest the bones. I told the woman who runs it about my book and said that I wanted to come see how skeletons are made. In the Bradbury story, the protagonist ends up having his bones pulled out through his mouth, by an alien disguised as a beautiful woman. Though he was reduced to a jellyfish heap on his living-room floor, his body remained intact. No blood was spilled.

This was, of course, not the case at the Maxwell lab. I was told I would have the choice of observing one of two steps: a "cut-down" or a "pour-off." The cut-down was more or less what it sounded like. They got the bones out the only way—barring retractable and highly specialized alien mouthparts—one can: by cutting away the flesh and muscle that surrounds them. Residual meat and sinew is dissolved by boiling the bones in a solution for a few weeks, periodically pouring off the broth and replacing the solution. I pictured the young men of Padua tending to their beloved professors' heads as they simmered and bobbed. I pictured the actors in a Shakespearean theater troupe I read about last year, confronted by a dead cast member's last request that his skull be used as Yorick. People really need to think these requests through.

About a month later, I got another e-mail from the university. They were writing to tell me they had switched to an insect-based process, wherein fly larvae and carnivorous beetles perform their own scaled-down, drawn-out version of the cut-down.

I did not sign on to become a skeleton. For one thing, I don't live in New Mexico and they won't come pick you up. Also, it turns out that the university doesn't make skeletons, only bones. The bones are left unarticulated and added to the university's osteological collection.[
1]

No one in this country, I learned, is making skeletons for medical schools.

The vast majority of the world's medical school skeletons have, over the years, been imported from Calcutta. No longer. According to a June 15,1986,
Chicago Tribune
story, India banned the export of bones in 1985, after reports surfaced of children being kidnapped and murdered for their bones and skulls. According to one story, which I desperately hope is exaggerated, fifteen hundred children per month were being killed in the state of Bihar, their bones then sent to Calcutta for processing and export. Since the ban, the supply of human bones has dwindled to almost nothing. Some come out of Asia, where, it is rumored, they are dug up from Chinese cemeteries and stolen from Cambodia's killing fields. They are old, mossy, and generally of poor quality, and for the most part, detailed plastic skeletons have taken their place. So much for my future as a skeleton.