Corpse Conundrums

Part One of Three

Corpse?  Corpse?  Am I really going to title this post with such a triggering, unseemly term? Corpse is a word only rivaled by carcass or cadaver in raw bluntness. All three terms begin with hard, raspy consonant sounds and are stripped of all the softening euphemisms that help smooth discussions of how we handle our dead.  Other terms are so much easier to hear and say––deceased, departed, remains, cremains, the body, and even stiff, if a bit of gallows humor seems appropriate.

In my quest to open my mind and heart and learn to make friends with death, two books with corpse in their titles brought the word front and center in my awareness:  Advice for Future Corpses and Those Who Love Them: A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying ( 2018) by Sally Tisdale and Corpse Care:  Ethics for Tending the Dead by Cody Sanders and Mikel Parsons (2023). I highly recommend them both. These books broke open a topic I believed had long ago settled into the fabric of the American way of death care. The emerging avenues of consideration I had long overlooked, upended my understanding. My adverse and charged reaction to the word corpse in the titles of these books was a powerful indicator to me that death and I are merely at the acquaintance stage.  I have much to learn before death and I can become friends. 

Until the fall of 2022, it never occurred to me to think much about what should become of my body at the time of my death. My default tendency to sink into a conform-to-social-norms space coupled with my persistent death-denial prevented me from turning my usually curious mind toward exploring how we handle bodies after death. It simply never occurred to me that there were any serious options to consider other than embalmed burial or cremation.

My pension contains a death benefit for my children to use to cover funeral costs, so costs, even though I thought they were excessive, hadn’t driven me to research alternatives.My experience taught me that deaths in the family were unquestionably and routinely handled by funeral professionals with a range of set fees.

Professional services started with a simple death-site phone call initiating a legally regulated process ending at a burial site, in ashes contained in a vessel on someone’s mantle or scattered in a few places where they were allowed. My parents and infant son’s cremains are buried at the family’s cemetery gravesite. My older brother had a long standing contract with the Neptune Society. With just one or two exceptions the many funerals I had attended during my lifetime had been Celebrations of Life with bodies safely tucked away in their final resting spaces.

The local cemetery where my immediate family members are buried is not a place I’m drawn to. It’s located a long way from my home in a part of town I have no other reason to visit. The aesthetics of the grounds and buildings are at best uninspiring. So I choose to grieve, honor, and “visit” them in my own times and spaces.  In short, a cemetery for me is not a requirement nor a desirable place for solace or remembrance.

In the fall of 2022,  I was awakened to new and preferable possibilities, when my first husband and the father of my children preceded me in death. I learned that in 1980, he  had chosen a path that departed from the expected norm. He donated his corpse to Stanford Medical School.  It was a wonderful choice that completely aligned with his values and life experiences. He loved education, devoting close to 40 years teaching math to junior high schoolers. He survived a leg amputation from a motorcycle accident in his early 30s. In later years, an aneurism and several other major health challenges resulted in long and complex hospital experiences. Physicians and local hospital personal became friendly allies that held his respect and gratitude.  He wanted to give back to them.

He also wanted the disposition of his body to not be burdensome to his children logistically or financially. A whole body donation to Stanford University’s Medical School meant that everything was taken care of from the moment of his death until the educational use of his body was exhausted. At that point, he was cremated at no charge and his remains were returned to the family. In addition, a beautiful memorial service honoring the year’s donors was held at the Stanford Chapel and attended by medical school students, faculty members and families of the donors.

My response to that experience, was appreciation on all counts. I was a Stanford alumna, also a life-long educator with the added incentive that one of our grandchildren was currently on a pre-med track serving as a TA in her university anatomy course. So there was no question in my mind that I too wanted my body to contribute to the education of future medical professionals.  I downloaded the forms, completed them and  added “get Stanford forms notarized and mailed” to my immediate To Do list.

Then I sat down with a late-night cup of decaf for a bit of TV. I randomly chose John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight from the menu on the DVR.  It turned out to be a rant in his inimitable British-accented, hilarious form that was directed at the current and much delayed lack of regulations governing body donations to institutions that train medical professionals. A decade ago in 2003, Los Angeles authorities discovered that falsified blood tests were used in shipping body parts to a San Diego medical-device company. This led to the arrest and conviction of the director of the Willed Body Program at the UCLA medical school and his accomplice. They had harvested hundreds of body parts from the program’s storage sites and sold them for personal financial gain. Prosecution was tricky because at that time, there were no clear federal or state laws regulating the use of donor cadavers at the facility or other similar ones at medical schools across the nation. University policy has now rid the scandalous practice from UCLA.  However, preventative federal legislation is still pending a decade later.

As recently as last year, a similar scandal broke at Harvard capping a decade of reports of unregulated whole body donations being broken into body parts and sold as commodities.

To date it has been left to individual medical schools to tighten their policies. It is incumbent on each potential donor to ask questions and confirm the institutions policy and enforcement procedures.

The American Anatomical Association has finally stepped to the forefront and will hopefully spearhead political action. They have drawn up and issued a best practices protocol for their members and urged the press to publish the following public statement:

ROCKVILLE, MD—JUNE 15, 2023 – In response to the allegations of illicit buying and selling of stolen body parts from Harvard Medical School's body donation program, the American Association for Anatomy (AAA) stands united in strong condemnation of the commercialization of human body donors and any action that violates donor ethics and trust.

. . . Individuals who violate donor and public trust should be held accountable under the law. To ensure the ethical, legal, and responsible operation of body donation programs nationwide, the AAA calls upon government and law enforcement agencies, academic institutions, and regulatory bodies for both justice and collaborative reform to prevent the misuse and commodification of human body donors. 

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To Be Continued on Wednesday June 4

Thus, was my once-settled decision disrupted. Now, late in the game, research I thought I had concluded, began again.  This post spawned two more posts. In these I chronicle what I am learning about the expanding world of corpse care. I also share my decision on what I want for the disposition of my body.

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