Useful At Last

This year I turn 37, so, unless I do anything foolish like writing commentaries attacking the National Rifle Association, I can assume I’ve more or less reached the halfway point in my life; and it occurs to me that on this solemn occasion I should give some thought to dying, and death, and what I want to become of my body after I die.

I have no interest whatever in being cryogenically preserved until some future time when whatever I die of may be curable. If I go quietly to rest the last thing I want is to be revived in some era when everyone has adapted gills to breathe smog and watches 4000 channels of commercial TV.

Cremation might seem appropriate for an essayist–to go out in one final, conclusive blast of hot air–but I don’t like the idea of sooting up the atmosphere or burning thirty board feet of good wood. Most of all I don’t fancy being converted into ash. I’ve never found ash appealing–so pale and lightweight. I always wanted to amount to something more substantial than that.

Maybe I could leave behind just one fragment of myself, something that wouldn’t take up much room and would require little dusting–the first distal phalange of my right index finger, say, a bone, recognizably human, a crucial bone to my trade, being the tip of one of the two fingers I type with, the finger I try to point at this or that idiocy, or this or that nifty solution to the world’s problems.

Unfortunately, the poor little chunk of calcium could cause all sorts of controversy. Is this or is this not the genuine article? enquiring minds would want to know. Is this a Tim Brookes relic or, as Chaucer has it, a pigges bone? The last thing I want to leave the Vermont State Police struggling to contain a gang of Tim Brookes distal phalange counterfeiters who are busy claiming the bone will cure warts and writer’s block and whatnot. Organized crime would be up here like a shot. A volley of shots.

I’m not very excited about burial, either. Although there are all sorts of valuable protein exchanges and cell recyclings that will benefit a limited number of microbes and bacteria and insects, I don’t really care all that much. My ambition in death is to do something a little more than to make a few dozen earthworms a little plumper, and fractionally more appetizing for robins and ducks. I want to be useful. One of the high points of my writing career was when I found that the Burlington Free Press, for which I was writing film reviews, was shredded, soaked in flame-retardant and blown into people’s walls as insulation. Useful at last.

Thing is, I’m not sure how to be useful after death. I’d quite happily be a transplant donor–anyone who needs it is welcome to take anything out of my body they want–but the trouble is, the organs that are most available are those that are least useful. Most of mine will have quite a few miles on them if I reach 75.

Besides which, I refuse to leave my body to science. When I was in college, many of my friends were medical students, and the last thing I want is to have one of my arms or legs stolen and stuck in someone’s bed, or in the college soup, as some medic friends of mine did to the corpse of someone called Horace Carter. Being dead has a certain amount of dignity; being a cadaver has none at all.

Perhaps the answer is to be a cadaver for some alien science. If I were shot into space to drift in some kind of preserved state, maybe in the U.S.S. Formaldehyde, across the universe until I’m finally picked up by intelligent beings in Tau Ceti, I’d be a scientific curiosity, a celebrity corpse. Even in alien societies I can’t imagine that the first corpse of another species would be allowed to fall into the hands of 19-year-old pathology students with a penchant for practical jokes.

No. This will be the big time. “This unfortunate–if hideous–alien,” their leader will say over me, as flashbulbs explode around us, “must have died somewhere out there in the unimaginable lonely vastness of space. But his death was not in vain. By a thorough scientific study of his body we’ve been able to learn vast amounts about his ugly and bizarre species, especially those who lived in a particularly ghastly micro-social-grouping called Basingstoke, England. His loss is our gain. He gave his life not only for his kind; he gave it for ours. We who are all to die salute him.”

1990, Vermont Public Radio