I finished reading Stiff by Mary Roach and I know that when I die, I do not want to be buried in a coffin or cremated. At first, I found it really disturbing that people donated their bodies to science to have themselves be grossly dissected and mutilated by other people. When you choose to donate your body to science, you can only indicate what you do not want scientists to do with your corpse-anything else is fair game including being a crash dummy, being shot at, or worse left to rot on a hill so that criminal scientists can learn about corpse decomposition after a crime has occurred. Roach has convinced me though, that bodies locked in a coffin will suffer a similar fate as a dissected corpse. Both are not pretty so I might as well be a productive corpse. The same unproductive use of a body goes for cremation but if you do not feel comfortable with donation, you can throw your body in a compost bin and become soil for a tree.
Anyway, Roach concluded in a self reflective chapter that as much as she wants her corpse to be useful, the people who have the final say will be her surviving family members who will have to deal with her departure. If they are not comfortable with giving your body away, then you can’t say much because you are not the ones grieving. So I hope my future family will be okay with my decision.
Now, I am reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson and it is a really great book. It is about the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and I am surprised that this monumental event was not taught in more detail in my U.S. History class. Hopefully I will be able to finish this book next week so that I can start Watchmen!
Watch Grocer’s Son if you get the chance. I kind of wished my life was as simple as Antoine’s life in that I can just drive a grocery van around France’s rolling countryside and sell produce and miscellaneous stuff to old people.
