Deathternity talks about all things death related. There are 1 million+ owned graves in cemeteries in America that people will not use. Cemeteries do not buy graves back. I would encourage people to begin thinking about either selling or buying these graves at a deep discount to what your cemetery charges. Or you can donate unused graves for a tax deduction. If I can help you with this please contact me here, email me at deathternity@gmail.com, or call me at 215-341-8745. My fees vary.
Loretta Anne Woodward Veney
with her mother, Doris Woodward. Ms. Veney’s upbeat memoir, “Being My
Mom’s Mom,” describes the years she has spent caring for her mother.Credit
Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times
Longevity
is generally better than its alternative. But when the body or
especially the mind wears out, caring for yourself or finding someone
else to do it for you can impoverish you in short order.
We
fail to plan for it at our peril. So when it seemed that Republicans in
Washington were close to passing legislation that could fundamentally
change Medicaid, Iwrotefivestraightcolumns
about the program. Already, the majority of Americans need Medicaid to
pay for at least some of their nursing home costs or care at home
because they’ve run out of money. Proposed caps on Medicaid, which have
not come to pass for now, had the potential to cause enormous problems.
In
the wake of those articles, you wrote in, hundreds of you, with
harrowing stories and hard-won advice, more of which I intend to present
in future columns. But a smaller number of people wrote in unprompted
to assign me homework — books that they found useful as they were
navigating their own changing conditions or those of spouses, close
friends or other family members.
This
week, I read all four books that came up at least twice in your
correspondence. I don’t recommend you do the same, for if you’re more
empathetic than average or prone to anxiety, you’ll finish the reading
sprint, as I did, emotionally wrung out and worried sick.
Still,
these books are all in their own way utterly essential reading. Few of
us are prepared for the financial and emotional complexities of managing
the last several years of our lives. But as we live longer, drain what
may prove to be inadequate retirement savings and lean harder on already
strained government programs, we’ll probably find ourselves facing ever
more challenging questions and unfortunate compromises.
We may as well know what’s coming. Here’s what I learned.
I
started here, with this book by a New Yorker writer and physician who
aims to help readers avoid what he calls a “warehoused oblivion,” even
if none of us will win the ultimate battle.
The
book is a good introductory text in part because of the sobering
statistics. By age 85, 40 percent of people have some form of dementia.
There are 350,000 falls each year that lead to broken hips. Once you’ve
got a fracture there, there’s a 40 percent chance you’ll end up in a
nursing home and a 20 percent chance you’ll never walk again.
A
good geriatrician, one hopes, will school you in stability to lessen
the chance of taking a spill. But good luck finding one, since their
numbers have declined even as studies show that people do better over
all under their care. Think your family will be there to steady you or
at least check in? According to Dr. Gawande, half of the very old among
us live without a spouse, and we’re having fewer children than ever
before.
He
writes movingly of his own father’s death, and I felt the lump rising
in my throat five times over 263 pages. But it is the chapter titled
“Letting Go” that I found most useful. There, he discusses the powerful
effect of frequent, concerted conversations about goals and wishes at
the end of life — not just bland, advanced medical directives in writing
but continuing talks out loud.
“It
is not death that the very old tell me they fear,” he writes. “It is
what happens short of death.” But we don’t think about it enough, and we
talk about it even less. Having read this book, I won’t make that
mistake or let anyone close to me make it either.
The
title is a sympathetic nod to what it feels like to care for someone
with Alzheimer’s, other dementias or memory loss, and it could take
nearly that long to read this book and absorb.
Still,
its value is in its encyclopedic nature, including detours into
necessary but often uncomfortable topics like adult diapering and
masturbation. These authors have clearly heard and seen it all.
The
tips in Chapter 16 for people shopping for long-term care residences of
various sorts are particularly comprehensive. You’ll finish thinking
that this is a selection process that shouldn’t happen within 24 hours
of a hospital discharge but should instead unfold over weeks, and you’ll
be right.
The
reward for living a reasonably long life, according to Jane Gross’s
mother, was getting to “rot to death” rather than merely dying. As a
physician Ms. Gross quotes later in her book confirms, this “inching
toward oblivion” is no longer bad luck but a “generalizable phenomenon.”
With
that bit of foreboding as a baseline, Ms. Gross takes us on a
no-holds-barred tour through the years that she and her brother spent
caring for their late mother. The author, a former New York Times
reporter whom I’ve never met save for a few encounters on social media,
is unafraid to admit all the mistakes she made out of sheer ignorance
and how often even the most high-functioning adult children simply do
not know what they do not know.
The
book explains the financial side of her mother’s care — including her
eventual qualification for Medicaid — plain as day. I also picked up
even more tips for a list I’ll eventually publish of questions to ask
before picking a nursing home or assisted living facility.
As
someone with a sister and two sisters-in-law, I found the book most
useful as a sort of post-mortem meditation on gender. Women often lose
out twice or more in the aging derby, first when they take on
disproportionate responsibility for their aging parents and then again
when they outlive their spouses in old age. Ms. Gross’s raw honesty
about her feelings about all of this — often fair and sometimes not, by
her own admission — makes this book mandatory reading for any man with a
sister who wants to be thoughtful about planning for aging parents.
There
is no sugarcoating the number of physical and emotional challenges that
come with aging, so it’s clear why Ms. Veney’s upbeat memoir of the
years she has spent caring for her mother, Doris Woodward, who has
dementia, is so appealing.
Ms.
Veney’s steadfast focus on her own mental health is something others
will want to mimic. Her aim is tranquillity and patience, with an
emphasis on reprogramming her reactions, like her frustration with being
late.
She’s
also practical about doing whatever works to make her mother happy.
While Ms. Woodward had no taste for McDonald’s in her younger years, she
found it soothing for whatever reason once her decline began. Often,
the two of them would stay there for hours.
Finally,
Ms. Veney devotes a chapter to humor. Laughing with someone afflicted
with dementia can, in her view, be life-affirming in a period when joy
may be elusive. So we hear of her mother’s confusion over her new memory
foam slippers. How was something on her feet going to help her brain?
she wondered.
Photo
Ms. Veney and Ms. Woodward in Fort Washington, Md.Credit
Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times
At
the end of one particularly challenging day out, the pair stopped for
dessert. When they arrived back at her mother’s group home where she had
lived for more than a year, she did not recognize it though she did
thank her daughter for the treat. “I just don’t remember where I live,”
Ms. Woodward told her daughter. “But of course I remember the ice
cream.”
Paying for the Nursing Home: Tell Us Your Story
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A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Facing Dread Of ‘Inching Toward Oblivion’.
In the future, your body won’t be buried... you’ll dissolve
For centuries, humanity's dead bodies
have been either buried or cremated. Now, a growing movement is
advocating for a cleaner, more sensitive alternative
Spencer Lowell
The
Resomator stands monolithic in the corner of a room in the bowels of
the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It's as sterile as a
hospital here, but every patient is already dead. This is the
penultimate stage of their time under the care of Dean Fisher, director
of the Donated Body Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
Bodies are wheeled in under crisp sheets for disposal in Fisher's
alkaline hydrolysis machine, which turns them into liquid and pure white
bone. Their bones will be pulverised and scattered off the coast by
nearby Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps Base, where they will float and
then disperse, because pure calcium phosphate will not sink. From the
coastguard's helicopter it looks like drug lords flushing their stash.
The
machine emits a low hum, like a lawnmower several gardens away. The
cadavers awaiting grinding sit in blue plastic containers at the back of
the room, identities anonymised by numbers and dog tags. The chalky
bones are soft enough to destroy by hand: touch a femur and it falls
apart.
Fisher has been running this model since March
2012 and he still can't believe it, he's gushing like it's a car on a
game show. It is one of only three in the United States, and not
commercially legal in California. He's removed the stainless- steel
panels to reveal the inner workings, all the pipes and machinery that
are neatly tucked away. Bodies go in through the same circular steel
door that the British Ministry of Defence uses on its nuclear-class
submarines. "It's great, isn't it?" he says, beaming behind his glasses.
"Oh man, it's just the best!" Fisher has the kind of personality you
can't help feeling is wasted on the dead.
The machine is mid-cycle.
Fisher, grey-haired and tall in light green scrubs, explains what's
happening inside the high-pressure chamber: potassium hydroxide is being
mixed with water heated to 150°C. A biochemical reaction is taking
place and the flesh is melting off the bones. Over the course of up to
four hours, the strong alkaline base causes everything but the skeleton
to break down to the original components that built it: sugar, salt,
peptides and amino acids; DNA unzips into its nucleobases, cytosine,
guanine, adenine, thymine. The body becomes fertiliser and soap, a
sterile watery liquid that looks like weak tea. The liquid shoots
through a pipe into a holding tank in the opposite corner of the room
where it will cool down, be brought down to an acceptable pH for the
water treatment plant, and be released down the drain.
Fisher says
I can step outside if it all gets too much, but it's not actually that
terrible. The human body, liquefied, smells like steamed clams.
This, Fisher explains, is the future of death. Dean Fisher, director of the UCLA Donated Body Program, in front of the Resomator
Spencer Lowell
The GeoCities fansites of the 90s have been outmoded in every industry but death.
There are sites that automatically play MIDI tracks when you arrive at
them, cursor heads that turn into trailing doves when they move. Above
them sit cheap stock images of old couples smiling. These are not the
websites of an industry that likes change.
Burial and cremation,
the most common ways that bodies are processed after death, haven't
fundamentally changed in centuries. The modern act of embalming,
popularised during the American Civil War, is a physically violent one
in which blood goes down the drain, untreated, after being pushed out by
embalming fluid pumped through the vascular system. Full of nine litres
of dyed-pink, carcinogenic formaldehyde and various other chemicals,
the body is put in the ground, where its decomposition is delayed but
not entirely so. In the first year, approximately half of the chemicals
will seep out into the surrounding soil as the body putrefies, along
with any chemotherapeutic drugs present in the body at the time of death.
In 2015, flooded cemeteries in
Northern Ireland were reported to be leaching chemicals out of bodies
and into the groundwater, posing a threat to the living nearby. In the
US alone, more than three million litres of embalming fluid are buried
every year. Lead coffins may stop chemicals seeping out, but the lack of
oxygen turns the body into a black soup; old London cemeteries such as
Highgate ask tourists not to lean on coffins in the catacombs in case
they upset the structural integrity of the box and the soup pours out.
Seventy-five
per cent of people in the UK are cremated, but few ask what it entails.
They don't know that halfway through the process a crematory operator
will open the door and use a rake to hook the skeleton by the ribs and
move it around to ensure the whole body is touched by flame. They don't
know that, despite the best efforts of crematory operators, bone dust
catches in the bricks of the retort (the chamber in which the deceased
is burned). Cross-contamination of bodies is inevitable.
Caitlin Doughty runs
Undertaking LA, a nonprofit funeral home on Santa Monica Boulevard, and
wrote about her time working in crematoria in her memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. She wages a gentle war on the industry through her YouTube series Ask a Mortician
and a TED talk, trying to get us closer to our dead and, by extension,
our mortality. After years spent dealing with bodies, she believes
cremation is not the way to do it. "We're sending our families into
these intimidating industrial warehouses with behemoth fire machines
belching natural gas," she says. "It's almost cruel."
Doughty told
me that if there's a future for death beyond burial and cremation, it's
alkaline hydrolysis. It's legal in the UK but, despite lobbying from
advocates in the funeral industry who argue the process is more
efficient and better for the environment, is currently only legal in 14 US states and three Canadian provinces.
Doughty
says machines like the Resomator will make a huge difference to our
experience of death. They can be installed in clean, bright,
well-designed spaces without all the heat and noise of a crematory. "We
have to do so much better in designing our death spaces," she says.
Human bones that have been processed by alkaline hydrolysis crumble and fall apart to the touch
Spencer Lowell
Sandy Sullivan is sitting in a desolate London pub
on a Tuesday afternoon explaining how his quest to change the funeral
industry happened through the medium of mad cows. Just off the plane
from Glasgow, Sullivan's not-quite-ginger stubble shows flecks of grey
in the sunlight. An hour from now, he'll swap his dark jeans for a suit
and head to the Cremation Society's annual dinner, an invitation which
he says proves that people are starting to take him seriously. Sullivan
doesn't like to tell people on planes what he does for a living; say you
dissolve human bodies and you end up answering questions for the rest
of the flight.
The British BSE epidemic saw 4.4 million cattle
slaughtered between 1988 and 1998. The culled animals were burned in
mass pyres, corpses heaped in the middle of the fields they once grazed.
If you lived near enough, you could smell the smoke in your house. The
flames charred the bones and rendered the remains safe enough to put in
landfill, but failed to destroy the prions - the misfolded protein that
causes the brain degeneration. As a result, in 2006 the European
Parliament approved a new method of animal disposal: alkaline
hydrolysis. You can now send your loved one's ashes into orbit on a SpaceX rocket
You can now send your loved one's ashes into orbit on a SpaceX rocket
At the time, Sullivan was working for a company called
WR² (The "wr" stands for waste reduction), selling the machines that
melted cows. The company had been founded in the mid-90s by two
professors at Albany Medical College, who had patented the technique to
dispose of contaminated animals - namely, radioactive rabbits. Gordon
Kaye, who was working on cancer research, was frustrated at paying $300
(£235) to dispose of each rabbit. A colleague, Peter Weber, provided a
solution.
Biochemists like Weber
hydrolysed proteins all the time for amino acid analysis, but one of the
ways of doing it - alkaline hydrolysis, using potassium hydroxide or
sodium hydroxide, otherwise known as lye - was rarely used because it
was so destructive it tore apart the very amino acids the scientists
were trying to analyse.
Kaye and Weber began to experiment,
co-opting the university kitchen's old soup kettle. They once stuffed a
whole sheep into the pot, filled it with water and potassium hydroxide,
and set it to boil. But fat plus lye makes soap, so as the sheep boiled,
it foamed suds all over the laboratory floor.
By 1994, the
professors had a patent, and a company, to manufacture huge
stainless-steel pressure containers as big as the back of a
double-decker bus into which numerous cattle could be wedged and
dissolved cleanly and efficiently.
At WR², Sullivan pushed for the
company to expand into machines for humans. In 1995 the company had
built and sold one machine, by request, to the Shands Hospital at the
University of Florida in Gainesville, for the disposal of several
medical cadavers in one cycle. In 1998, Joe Wilson, their newly
appointed company president and CEO, had built a singular human machine
but it was considered too radical an idea for the funeral industry, so
it remained under a tarpaulin in the factory. There's a photo of Wilson
smiling inside it, wearing a baseball cap and a plaid shirt, testing the
fit of the steel coffin. To photograph the future of death, you've gotta feel dead
To photograph the future of death, you've gotta feel dead
WIRED Photo
"I started going to cremation meetings and did a little
bit of market research," says Sullivan. "Because of the inherent
environmental benefits and low running costs from an energy perspective,
it seemed an obvious fit [for the funeral industry]."
In the mid
aughts, the company got a call from Dean Fisher, then director of
anatomical bequests, Department of Anatomy, at the Mayo Clinic in
Minnesota, asking for a machine suitable to process an individual human.
They built him one from scratch according to his specifications.
Seventeen days after they delivered the machine, WR² went bankrupt and
stopped answering calls.
WR² hadn't failed because of any lack of
demand for the machines. Kaye and Weber, the scientists who founded the
company, both agreed they were lousy businessmen and returned to their
laboratories. Wilson decided to launch his own company, selling the
machines to the livestock and veterinary industries.
By now it was late 2006. The Mayo had a machine to dissolve bodies, but no instructions. Sullivan saw an opportunity. The Resomator's chamber is cleaned to a high level of sterility by Alex Rodriguez, Dean Fisher's assistant
Spencer Lowell
"It was a freaking mess. It was $380,000 just sitting there."
The
machine was not the dream Fisher thought it would be. He and a
colleague had attended a national Anatomical Board meeting in
Gainesville, Florida, and were given a tour of the university lab. They
were taken to a room off the loading dock and shown Shands' enormous WR²
machine. Staff would stuff the bodies into nylon bags, hang them off
ropes from the side, and dissolve five at a time. The bone was kept
separate, but the fluid was sloshing around between them. "We thought it
was kind of gross," says Fisher. "And then we saw the finished
product." It was not the grey cat-litter bone grit that came from the
crematorium.
Fisher
had asked WR² to make him one for individual humans: to turn the
chamber horizontal and to include a tray in the middle that the body
could lie on, alone.
But when his WR² machine arrived, he couldn't
get it to work. "We'd run it, open up the door and it'd be a half-baked
body." He shields his eyes with his hands, mimes slamming the door in
disgust. "You'd see flesh still on the body, some of the bones were free
but most of it was just so gross and so bad. We'd have to run it three
times. And this went on for about a month. We could not get it right at
all. We had the crematoria cremating them again." Even now he sounds
genuinely heartbroken by the disappointment. It's the only time when
he's talking about the machine that Dean Fisher is not smiling.
He
was sitting in a sporting goods store soon after when Sullivan called
him on his mobile. Fisher heard Sullivan's Glaswegian accent, didn't
understand a word of it, and immediately hung up. The skull's job is to protect the brain, making it the hardest body part to deal with
Spencer Lowell
In death, the skull presents an issue. The structure
evolved to protect the brain and is extremely good at its job: aside
from the eye sockets and the underneath of the skull, flames have no way
of getting inside, and neither does liquid. In a crematory retort, the
flames shoot down from the ceiling and the skull is cracked and blown
open violently, or helped along by a crematory operator with a
long-handled rake. But towards the end of an alkaline hydrolysis cycle,
when all flesh has dissolved off the skeleton and the bones begin to move around the machine, the skull bobs along the top with the brain still inside it.
This
was not a big deal at Mayo where the majority of cadavers had had their
skull caps removed for educational purposes anyway, but if Sullivan was
going to transform the industry, he couldn't go asking funeral
directors to slice the deceased's head open. When he finally got Fisher
on the phone long enough to explain that he had worked at WR² and wanted
to commercialise the idea for humans, Sullivan promised to fix the
machine gathering dust in Fisher's lab. Then they would experiment with
it, fix the problem of the skull, try ways of taking alkaline hydrolysis
to the commercial market.
Together, they devised a cage that
holds the head in place so the eddy of liquid puts pressure on the skull
and breaks it open like an egg. It was the most dignified way of doing
it, and for Sullivan, dignity is important. He says this not in the
euphemistic way the funeral industry speaks ("interment space" instead
of "grave"), but because he genuinely means it. Sullivan worries about
rival companies doing it badly, unsafely. He worries that their work
will be lumped in with his own and put the technology back decades.
He's
referring, specifically, to Bio-Response Solutions in Danville,
Indiana, the company his former colleague Joe Wilson started after the
implosion of WR². After two years of manufacturing machines for animals,
Wilson decided to follow Sullivan's lead and revisit his idea from 1998
- a machine for an individual human.Bio-Response solved the skull issue
by putting the bodies in head first, tilting the tank with a crank, and
letting the weight of the body force the skull on to a spike, not
unlike that which pierces the seal on a tube of antiseptic cream. As the
head is crushed and the body dissolves, the feet slide into the liquid,
but you can never be sure when they enter the water, whether they had
enough time in there to disappear.
Bio-Response Solutions have
sold nearly 100 alkaline hydrolysis machines - to veterinary colleges
and pet cremation companies. Its human machines outsell Resomation's by
five to one. Wilson says he only went into the human side of the
industry after Sullivan refused to do a low-end, low-pressure machine
that family-run funeral homes could afford. He calls his company "the
Ford of the industry. [Sullivan] has built a BMW. I would not have
gotten into it if he built a machine for the average guy."
Sullivan
doesn't like the skull spike, or the fact that Wilson is selling
machines that cost a third of the price and take 14 hours to complete a
cycle instead of four. "It's disrespectful, it's not dignified, it's not
Resomation," he says. At an alkaline hydrolysis symposium in February
2017, the pair got into an argument, shouting over the heads of the
crowd.
The collective failure to settle on a marketable name for
alkaline hydrolysis is indicative of a fractured movement. Sullivan
refers to a body being "resomated" but the term is a registered
trademark, so no one else can use it. On its website, Bio-Response
Solutions leaps through linguistic hoops to avoid calling it anything at
all, using phrases like "this form of disposition". Qico, another
California-based alkaline hydrolysis startup, prefers "water cremation".
The Resomator's chamber is cleaned to a high level of sterility by Alex Rodriguez, Dean Fisher's assistant
The
lack of clarity has caused a confusion on a legal level about whether
alkaline hydrolysis is simply a different form of cremation or an
entirely new disposal method. In 2010, the Cremation Association of
North America changed its definition of cremation to include alkaline
hydrolysis, which doesn't make it legal but identifies it as a variant
of a process that already exists: you're still reducing the body to bone
fragments that can be returned to the family as ashes. Some states
recognise it as a third method; in Oregon, where it's legal, it's
"dissolution".
Convincing the public is not the issue. "Every
family that I explained the process to wanted it for their loved one,"
says Jeff Edwards, a funeral director in Ohio who purchased a machine
from Bio-Response Solutions in 2011. "The public is far from stupid."
But, while the cost of running the machine is cheaper for the operator,
Edwards charges a premium price because the bodies have to be
transported out of the state to do it. Bones from a resomated body are processed and scattered in the ocean
Decomposition, decay and the 'future of death': what really happens when we die
Death
Progressive independent funeral homes are slowly
adopting alkaline hydrolysis - two in Florida and Minnesota have
Resomators, more than a dozen have cheaper ones by Bio-Response
Solutions - but while it's less expensive in the long run to operate,
family-run funeral homes will take years to make up the Resomator's
£330,000 cost. For the process to take off commercially, the
corporations need to back it. Sullivan has just installed a Resomator in
Rowley Regis, near Birmingham, his first sale in the UK after a decade
of trying. It made the local papers.
But there is money to be
made. "The current installations are seeing an 80 per cent acceptance
rate," says Jevon Truesdale, founder of Qico. "We want to make it 100
per cent. Get rid of [cremation] altogether."
I meet Truesdale and
Qico's CEO, Jack Ingraham, at a rooftop bar in downtown San Diego.
Ingraham has a few shirt buttons undone, his hair slicked back, says
he's a sucker for a restaurant with a view. Their machines are
theoretical at this point; they have nothing to show in their office in
Ocean Beach. But they have nice suits and they have mock-ups: the
futuristic MZ-1 is white like an old iPod and shaped like a nautilus
shell. It doesn't look medical and it doesn't look like anything related
to death: thisis how they plan to differentiate themselves from the
competition. They picture a machine that can do everything inside its
shell. At no point does anyone have to come in contact with a bone. From left to right: penile implant, teeth and fillings, pacemaker, titanium hip joint, bladder implant, breast implant
Spencer Lowell
Qico
is here because the cremation rate in Japan is 99.97 per cent and if
they replace every crematory retort with a shiny white MZ-1 they would
quickly become millionaires. Its machine looks the way it does because
Truesdale has already pictured it on the cover of Time. He doesn't want
to be photographed beside something that "looks like it belongs in a
basement". Ingraham has never seen a dead body but is trying to sell a
machine that dissolves them.Truesdale and Ingraham pose a threat to
Sullivan and his machine at UCLA, but Sullivan's not worried. "These are
wide boys as far as I'm concerned," he says. "Truesdale's selling a
concept. What he's saying it can do, it can never do."
Wilson agrees. "[Qico] don't have anything. They have a picture of an egg."
It's
possible that Qico will amount to nothing, but the alkaline hydrolysis
movement is so small that each company could be tainted by anything the
other does. As they travel the country explaining the process to funeral
directors and helping to push bills through the courts, Qico doesn't
see legality or engineering an impossible machine as the thing standing
between them and that magazine cover: they see a whole stubborn industry
of businessmen just like them.
As Sullivan leaves to attend the
Cremation Society dinner, he stands up and hands me his business card.
"Be positive," he says, putting his wallet back in his pocket. "I
believe it's good for society, it's good for the environment, and the
quicker the backward ideas of the industry are resolved, the better."
Back
at UCLA, Fisher shrugs. For years he's been arguing with this industry,
mired as it is in financial motivation parading as tradition. They
don't care that this machine, with its diminished environmental,
emotional and financial impacts, could save the world - or at least
delay its demise, one body at a time. Amuffled dual-tone alarm sounds in a cupboard.
Fisher opens it to show me a tiny implantable
cardioverter-defibrillator, the batteries of which have been slowly
running down for years. "It's been through the machine and the battery's
still working. Crazy, isn't it?"
On a small blue hand towel,
below the buckets of teeth and fillings (teeth are separated from bones -
metal fillings could break the cremulator in which the bones are ground
into a powder), is a collection of metal hip joints, valves, stents
that propped open the chambers of hearts, pins, plates; things that have
washed up on the tray after the people around them have disappeared.
The process is gentle enough to render a hernia mesh as new as the day
the surgeon implanted it, but strong enough to bleach the colour out of
glass eyes and fake fingernails.
Fisher motions to the array of
pacemakers he's collected. Aside from these few he's saved, he has all
of the metal recycled. The money he makes from the refiners goes toward
the servicing of the machine; he says it ends up paying for itself. He
flips over a pacemaker and holds it in front of my face. "If you look at
all this, you can still read the label. You can't put these in a
crematory. You have to cut them out." In the crematory retort, prosthetics melt or burn or,
in case of a pacemaker's lithium-ion battery, they explode. The titanium
ball-and-socket hip joints don't come out polished like a pristine
mirror like in Fisher's cupboard, they come out battered with carbon.
The silicon breast implant that Fisher jiggles in his hand ("we call
them jellyfish") has already spent a good few years inside a woman and
four hours inside the machine, but would melt like gum in a crematory
and need to be chiselled off the floor of the retort by hand. Other
implants, like plastic urinary pessaries or penile pumps, would never
even be seen by a crematory worker. They melt and escape into the
atmosphere through the chimney along with all of the mercury in your
teeth.
In the corner of the room the Resomator's cycle is nearing
its end. The noise is more intense; the pump beats like a straining
heart. Fisher lets me press the red button to stop it and Alex
Rodriguez, Fisher's right-hand man, swings open the door. There on the
tray, amid steam, lays the skeleton of a 90-year-old woman who donated
her body to the medical school. Rodriguez delicately picks up the larger
bones and places them in a tray. As he does so, he tells me what he
knows about her from her bones alone: that she had no teeth when she
died, because there are none here. That she had osteoporosis, which
turns your bones to dust before the cremulator. That she was small.
In
the 80s, before Fisher worked at the Mayo Clinic, he was a funeral
director in Minnesota. He knows where the money goes, and he knows when
to be frank. He also knows how to comfort the bereaved. When he's
notified about the death of a donor, he calls up their family, thanks
them for their generosity and assures them that he will take care of
their loved one. He explains exactly what will happen to the body: that
after the students have learned everything they can, their ashes will be
scattered in the Pacific Ocean and a memorial service will be held in
their memory.
If you're interested in donating your body one
day, Fisher will explain all this to you personally. He'll stand you in
front of this huge, silver machine and explain exactly how it works. And
later, after your remains have helped to teach the surgeons of the
future, Fisher will slide you in, quickly and quietly turning your body
back into the biological blocks that built you.
Hayley Campbell is a freelance journalist and the author of The Art of Neil Gaiman
