Over your dead body

I know what you mean. When I was a little kid, and I was going through my first "What is death, anyway?" phase, I was terrified that maybe dead people were walking around pretending to be alive. To reassure me that they were all safely tucked away, my mother took me on a picnic lunch to a cemetery. She told me not to worry, and she showed me how the dead people couldn't get out because they had these big heavy rocks, these tombstones, on top of them. It made me feel so much safer.

Of course she was lying to you, you know that, right?

Huh?

Oh, yeah, she was lying. Because the rocks aren't over the coffin. And plus, they can get out.

How?

A shovel. A little tiny shovel. That's all it takes.

So Bong and Clarita and Rosita, they're 6 feet below us?

By regulation, they are indeed 6 feet below us. But they are actually just buried in front of the tombstones. You're directly over Clarita right now. They used to not bury them so deep. But then in the 1800s, there was this whole popular theory of miasmas -- these toxic clouds that would hover over graves that were making people sick -- which was totally untrue. That theory was disproven by sanitation experts in the 1920s, but by then the "6 feet under" approach was pretty much in play.

Speaking of being 6 feet under, what do you think of the show?

Well, I've never actually seen it, because I don't have HBO. But in terms of what it shows about preparing dead bodies for funerals, I probably wouldn't be too impressed. After all, I've seen the real thing.

Is it true that nails and hair grow after death?

I don't think so. I think what led to that was the theory of shrunken head. Have you ever seen one?

Um, no.

(laughs) See, this shows that I've been a little too immersed in my subject, as I just assumed that why yes, of course you'd seen a shrunken head. You can see them at places like the Museum of Natural History. They show how tribes would actually shrink down the skulls of their enemies. So yes, when the head is so small it makes the hair look longer, and I've always suspected that that was the reason people concocted the "growing hair" theory.

Even though you like cemeteries, you say in the book that you want to be cremated. Yet, when your mother died, you decided to bury her.

Oh yeah, she was a good Catholic. Buried, funeral -- the whole nine yards.

Now that you know more about what happens to your mother's remains, the decay, the failures of embalming, do you ever think about her underground?

You know, no, I never thought about it before. Wow. This is the very first time.

It doesn't bother me though. I don't feel so strongly about burial that I would want to impose that on her. I personally would rather not be buried, because I just think it's expensive and a waste of space, and I'm just a practical, cheap person and I should remain that way in death. But I wanted to honor her wishes. The decision you make about what you would like to do with your body is really your last act of control.

So how much control would one have? Let's say I don't want to become a ballistics tester, and I don't want to be lying in some decay garden, while someone measures how long it takes for maggots to eat me, but I do want to donate my body to science. How do I sign up?

You donate to a specific institution, like Harvard, or the Mayo Clinic. You fill out the forms through the willed body program of the school. Most of the bodies are donated through anatomy labs, so you are dissected. But what you can do is specify things that you don't want done. For example, you could say, "I don't want to be used, specifically, for cosmetic surgeries." You can select what you don't want, not what you want.

What do you think about our need to control our bodies after we die, from the exact stipulations for funerals to the whole idea of embalming?

It's funny, in Sweden they are so anti-embalming, the idea of dosing one's entire body with these strong chemicals is very repugnant to the average Swedish person. It's done, but people there don't admit it because it runs counter to the country's whole idea of respect for the natural environment. But here, embalming is almost an extension of plastic surgery. And the effects are really remarkable. In the book I have a section where I describe seeing a guy embalmed, and it's really amazing. There is color in the fluid that they pump into the corpse, so suddenly the guy's face had a rosy glow, and he was no longer gaunt. I couldn't help but think, "Wow, this guy looks great! Sign me up!"

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