Stiffness

I am without a book! Kinda feels good though. 2 books in 7 weeks for me, not bad. Even Liz finished up The Year of The Flood, the second book to Oryx and Crake. Now we'll just wait for the 3rd book to come out in a few years. Meanwhile, I'll just spend the rest of the week soaking up the Beginners Special Edition for Triathlete magazine that I picked up.

So let me tell you briefly about Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. It very much satisfied my expectations to learn interesting factoids about the way people die in cars, planes, land mine clearing, and crucifixion. I found the chapter on the forensic study of purposefully decaying bodies to help solve crime cases gruesome and yet fascinating. Of course the chapter on how people really die in plane crashes will most likely cause me some anxiety later, but the idea of an experiment throwing clothed guinea pigs out of a plane did make me chuckle.

What I did not expect though was how the book has really made me think about how I want my dead body dealt with. Or perhaps what I want isn't so important as how my loved ones want my body handled. Hah! No you must make soup from my ashes and consume me. Anyway, cremation seems like a popular choice these days. But being frozen in liquid nitrogen and then broken down into small pieces by ultrasound for organic compost seems kinda interesting too. Or Plastination where silicone polymer is injected into my body which keeps it life like for around 10 thousand years!

In one episode of Human Planet, the Buddists living atop a mountain can't bury their dead or leave them out due to the altitude. They will only decay and increase the chance for disease. There is one person there who can help, who is not a monk, and who needs to down some hard liquor before hand. His job? To chop up the dead body for the vultures to eat. It is their way of helping feed these animals and returning themselves to nature.

To me that's actually not such a bad way to go. But there is the thought of giving your body to science. It's too bad you can't specify ( maybe you can now I didn't look) what you want done with your body, only what you don't want done. I think a couple of my friends would be up for some kind of ballistics testing or helping test equipment for landmine clearing.

But fascination aside, it's really hard to read this book and stay completely off the path of contemplating your own death....your finite-ness. That element is a bit of a downer and yet revives that saying "Carpe Diem" to a new perspective.