‘I told him I wouldn’t be seen dead in the same grave as him’

By Terry Prone FINDING out that your husband has bought himself a grave on the sly is not a positive experience.

Mine said he didn't buy it on the sly, he'd just never thought to tell me about it. He made it sound like a casual impulse purchase.

Other people buy magazines and Mars bars on impulse. He buys graves. Correction. Grave, singular.

Amazingly insulting, the singular nature of the purchase; he is clearly planning to tuck himself into his little tomb and leave me to fend for myself, although he maintains he'll die first and I can be put in afterward as a post-mortem postscript.

I told him I wouldn't be seen dead in the same grave as him.

Cremation crossed my mind as a possible alternative, but not for long, mainly because, if I predeceased him, I couldn't trust him to scatter the ashes correctly.

Long before cremation was acceptable in this country, he was persuaded by a bereaved man to scatter the ashes of the man's mother, who'd been cremated in Britain.

The ashes were to be scattered on Slieve Gullion in County Louth while the son took photographs.

Because my husband failed to check which way the wind was blowing, when he released the ashes, they got lashed right back at him, covering him head to toe.

Now, it would be sort of offensive to brush a man's mother off you while he's watching, but wearing her like snow isn't the best, either.

He did a lot of surreptitious shaking and got himself reasonably respectable, although he found at nightfall that the turn-ups of his trousers were still full of her.

Nobody with any sense would trust their cremated self to someone with that track record.

On the other hand, giving yourself to science isn't easy, either.

Organ donor cards are partial in their commitment.

Nobody offers a total-body donor card, mainly because relatives want to be able to bury their loved one, whereas I want to be all used up and leave no leftovers.

I figured if I rang the Department of Health last week about this desire, they might have a few more urgent things to be going on with, so instead I contacted a health board, where the communications people recommended I talk to one of the acute hospitals.

I obediently rang the general manager at a major teaching hospital.

"I want to give you my body after death," I told him. "There's no call to wait that long," he responded, not missing a beat.

He then admitted that he wouldn't, in the normal run of things, have that much use for me, dead, referring me instead to the Anatomy Department in UCC as the ultimate experts on this.

Very pleasant they were, too, if surprisingly picky about my body.

They didn't want it if I planned to die of diseases the anatomy students could catch, and they certainly didn't want it if it was missing some of its organs.

If for any reason someone had removed my liver or kidneys before death, they wouldn't take me.

I'd have thought medical students would be charmed to get a corpse with an exciting pre-mortem surgical history, but apparently what they really need is practice finding the interior bits where the bits are supposed to be found.

(Since my husband lost some of his working parts in a fight with cancer some years back, it's just as well he's getting buried. You don't want a medical student panicking when he or she can't find a spleen.You know how bad it is when you lose your car keys.)

When the helpful woman in UCC was outlining the constraints on donations, I had a mad urge to suggest they were looking a gift corpse in the mouth.

Two things buttoned my lip. The first was the probability that, in her job, she's had to tolerate years of ho-ho-hoing from the facetious.

The second was the all-pervasive awe with which we invest corpses, these days.

We subject everything else to humour, ridicule, irony and contempt.

But once you're dead and, ipso facto, have no feelings to hurt, everybody goes hushed and respectful and starts talking about 'closure.'

It's no accident that politicians spend half their lives sedulously attending funerals: presence at that final right of passage has an almost sacral significance.

When UCC's dignified explanatory sheet about what happens to donor bodies arrived, people in my office got quite upset, talking about my family not being able to have a funeral as if a funeral were a civil right under threat.

That my body might be more useful to medical students than in graveyard made brain sense to them, but not heart sense.

People find it difficult to get comfortable with the idea of lying naked on a mortuary table to be picked over and cut up after you are dead.

Such discomfort in the face of postmortem exposure goes back a long way.

One Roman emperor, trying to find a way to curtail a series of suicides among young Roman women, came up with the idea of announcing that in future the bodies of suicides would be taken naked through the streets of Rome.

The suicides stopped immediately.

Being dragged through a city, naked and dead, on a bier, was so horrible a prospect as to outweigh the desire to kill themselves.

I must be missing some aspect of the privacy gene, because, as long as I'm not around to see it, I don't care what anybody does with, or to my dead body.

They can use it for fertiliser if they want.

Admittedly, some options, viewed from this side of the grave, look more fun than others.

In the US, you can opt to specialise after death in traumatic car crashes.

That's because crash test dummies can only demonstrate some of what a collision at speed does to the human body, so they strap cadavers into the driver's seat and aim the car at a wall.

I'd quite like that. But then, almost any alternative would be better than the costly and anti-environmental option of an expensive coffin taking up space in a cemetery, because human bodies are so useful.

For example, cadaver skin is now used for grafts onto burn victims.

On the other hand, Mary Roach, an American writer who's done extensive study into what can be done with us after we die has drawn attention to the fact that cadaver skin not required for burn victims is now used for other less virtuous purposes.

Carefully processed, it is employed by cosmetic surgeons to fatten up wrinkles and enhance penises. Learning the latter gave Roach pause in her own plans to donate her body.

"While I have no preconceived notions of the hereafter," she says, "I stand firm in my conviction that it should not take the form of someone else's underpants."

It's a valid point. But if you're improving someone's life in some way, if it saves the fossil fuel cremation would require or the space in an overcrowded cemetery, and if above all you don't know anything about where precisely your cells are going to be employed, post-mortem, what's the problem?