Cover Story: So you’re dead. now what?

Despite our many efforts to stave off that black-clad, scythe-swinging party pooper, the Grim Reaper will one day pay us all a visit. Our knowledge of that is what separates us from all other animals.

But then what? As far as the final destination of our souls is concerned, most religious folks tend to think in terms of The Big Four: heaven, purgatory, reincarnation, and that nightmarish landscape of never-ending agony and pain, Alabama.

No big surprises there, but frankly, the selection seems skimpy. But what about your body? Now there’s the surprise: There is a veritable smorgasbord of options available to our earthly bodies once we pass on to the great hereafter. Over the course of history, the human cadaver has been buried quickly, kept around for a wake and then buried, mummified, cremated, thrown to wolves, used to test France’s first guillotines, aided in the evaluation of U.S. army rifles, served as human crash-test dummies, and been nailed to a cross in a Parisian lab. Today, corpses help pioneer new surgical procedures, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery; they serve as real-life (well, real death) resources for human decay research at the University of Tennessee (aka the “Body Farm”); and last year, late baseball legend Ted Williams was turned into a human Popsicle in the still-evolving field of cryogenics.

So think of the possibilities. Sure, you could play it safe and choose one of the usual postmortem routes, like cremation or being buried in a coffin six feet under, but they’ve both been done to death — ba-da-boom!

In an effort to think outside the pine box, we decided to explore some of the bold, weird, historic and plain creepy undertakings of the dearly departed.

From Mummies to Morticians

We’ve all heard the old saying that the two things in life that are certain are death and taxes. And while the tax part may not apply to some rightwing nut separatists who shun Uncle Sam, not even they can elude the angel of death (and I hear they’re mad as hell about it, too). With death being so inevitable, and seeing how we’re living in the world’s most prolific free-market society, our post-life options are to die for.

Most people in the U.S. still choose burial as their body’s post-life experience. Mankind first began burying its dead for practical and obvious reasons. A decomposing corpse wasn’t a very pleasant sight, and even less palatable to smell. They also tended to attract hungry predators, and spread all kinds of nasty diseases. Placing the dearly departed underground simply made life easier for the living.

Eventually, burying the dead took on profound spiritual and religious overtones. The ancient Egyptians, for example, believed that the dead lived on in the next world, and that their bodies had to be preserved forever as they were in life. With such a powerful inspiration, it’s no surprise that they were one of the first practitioners, and perfecters, of mummification.

Ancient Egyptian embalmers removed the brain from behind the eye socket or through a nostril by using a hook. All internal organs were also removed, except for the heart, which was thought to be the location of intellect and memory. They usually filled the empty abdomen with linen pads or sawdust, and then placed the body in natron (a compound of sodium salts found on lakeshores) until the tissues were dried out. Finally, they wrapped the body in layers of linen bandages and placed it in a coffin, which was then placed in a tomb, along with many treasured objects of daily use; the Egyptians believed the dead would need these artifacts in the next world. Thousands of years later, archaeologists continue to find these mummified bodies, including famous Egyptian pharaohs like Ramses II and Tutankhamen, and most recently, what’s believed to be the legendary Queen Nefertiti.

Today, we rely on the embalming process. For a detailed description of how it’s done, we consulted Brian Clyburn, general manager of Long and Son Mortuary Service in Charlotte, N.C.

The procedure starts with the mortician making several precise incisions — one just above the clavicle along the main carotid artery and another along the inner thigh at the femoral artery. Using tiny hooks called aneurysm needles, the tissue is pulled back, and small incisions are then made in the veins and arteries, into which tubes about the diameter of a pen are inserted.

Through these tubes embalming fluid — a combination of formaldehyde and alcohol — is pumped into the

arteries, while the vascular pressure forces blood out of the body’s veins. After the proper amount of blood has been drained from the body and the proper amount of embalming fluid pumped in, a long hollow metal tube is inserted in the corpse’s lower right abdomen, which drains any remaining fluid, swelling or gas. Finally, in preparation for the funeral, all the incisions are sewn up, make-up is applied, the hair is combed, proper attire is slipped on, and the body and facial features are posed just so.

The High Cost of Dying

A big part of the whole dying/funeral thing is choosing the right casket, or, as the folks in the funeral business like to call them, “interment vessels.” A cursory glance at the variety of materials and costs available is dizzying — buying a new car is less of a chore, and certainly no less fraught with financial risk. Markups range from four to 20 times wholesale, with the steepest at the lower end. In fact the funeral industry is one of the most profitable in the world. In 1960, America spent about $1.6 billion on its funerals and attendant costs. Today it’s over $23 billion.

The most popular casket material in use today is metal, or more specifically, steel-like alloys, which are relatively light and easy to construct. The average price for a metal casket ranges from $1,350 to $3,750, depending on the thickness of the metal.

For those looking to splurge, there are caskets made of “semiprecious” metals like bronze and copper, which are typically more durable. Bronze and copper are listed in weight per square foot of materials and prices can range anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000.

Then there are the more economic hardwood caskets, including oak, cherry, walnut, mahogany, poplar and plain old pine. While these can often be made into ornate works of art, they don’t offer the protective qualities of metal or steel caskets. Average price: $2,000. For the truly thrifty, $500 can get you a cloth-covered or plain wood casket.

Today, many funeral homes are offering caskets made of highly durable, state-of-the-art fiberglass and plastic. Many of these newer models come with a 500-year warranty and a price tag between $2,500 and $4,000.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the average funeral costs about $7,500, 15 percent of which is generally spent on the casket. However, these figures reflect the average of all funerals, including direct burials, indigent burials and cremations. They do not include the cost of burial plots, fees for opening and closing the grave, monuments and, in what is a uniquely American introduction to the industry, burial vaults.

Ostensibly designed as an outer receptacle to further protect the casket, some vaults can weigh up to a ton and are designed to resist 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (In case one of those rampant herds of urban elephants should trample your grave.) In the early 1900s, vaults were used in only about 5 percent of U.S. burials. Today, most places of burial insist on the use of the increasingly pricey vaults (which range from $500 to $3,000) to prevent the ground from collapsing.

Of course, not everyone needs these services. Cremation is an increasingly popular option today, accounting for the disposal of about 15 percent of the dead in the US, about 20 percent in Canada, and 60 percent in the U.K. It’s expected that in the next decade or so the number of dead who are cremated in the U.S. will increase to about 40 percent. The reasons for this are many. For one, it’s cheaper (about $1,000 without visitation). For another, it’s environmentally sound. According to the Cremation Association of North America, the average cremated ashes weigh about 6 1/2 pounds and take up the same amount of space as a shoebox.

During cremation the body is burned in a special oven between 1,500 to 1,900 degrees from one to four hours. The remaining bones are then crushed into white, powdery ashes, which are placed in an urn. The first legally recognized crematory for public use opened in Milan, Italy, in 1876. Crematories were first established in the United States in 1884.

For the true do-it-yourselfer, there are hundreds of websites where you can choose your own coffin, including PeachtreeCasketsDirect.com. This Atlanta-based company will overnight a casket custom-designed to your tastes, including a special casket for golfers titled “Fairway to Heaven,” or “Great Outdoors,” decorated with a landscape of eagles, lakes and mist-covered mountains, or the camouflage-themed “Hunting,” for those who, when alive, liked to shoot and kill animals. At trappistcaskets.com, monks will hand build old-world European style coffins (think Dracula’s casket) to fit your budget and style.

And who else to better tap into a market previously unexplored by rock stars than shameless huckster and tongue-wagger Gene Simmons. The KISS bass player and mouthpiece recently introduced the “Kiss Kasket,” tastefully covered with a laminated photo of the band and its logo. And in true rock ‘n’ roll fashion, the Kiss Kasket, which goes for about $4,000, can also be used as a giant cooler, so fans can also enjoy it when they’re still alive. If you really want to know more, go to www.kissonline.com.

Guillotines, Crucifixions and Frankenstein Monkeys

One of the more macabre uses of the human corpse took place in the late 1700s when some corpses were used to test the brutally efficient apparatus known as the guillotine. This nifty head-removing device was first used in France, largely because of Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin. While the good doctor didn’t invent the guillotine, he lobbied for its use, claiming it was a more humane way to kill than hanging, which was all the rage at the time.

At the time, however, several anatomists and scientists claimed that even after the head was lopped off, the brain remained active and continued to receive and process external signals for several torturous moments. Witnesses claimed to have seen decapitated heads gnashing their teeth and twisting their eyes for a good five minutes after the execution. The guillotine, these critics claimed, was a terrible torture device and had to be stopped.

To get to the bottom of the controversy, French officials enlisted the services of physician Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde, and began supplying him with the heads of recently guillotined prisoners so he could examine the state of their brain and nervous system. Laborde studied three separate heads, the last of which was a man named Gagny. Laborde claimed that after injecting Gagny’s head with oxygenated cow’s blood, muscles on the eyelids, forehead and jaw could be made to contract.

After studying just three heads, Laborde apparently grew bored with noggin experimentation and moved on to other things. But a number of scientists and doctors picked up where he left off, including a French physician named Beaurieux who reported that while studying the head of a prisoner who had recently been guillotined, he noted the “eyelids and lips worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five seconds.” As the face began to relax and the eyelids close, Beaurieux claimed he yelled out the prisoner’s name, at which time the eyes popped back open and focused on the doctor briefly before closing again.

With several doctors championing the idea that the human brain could be kept functional via an outside blood supply and a few other medical tricks of the trade, the issue of what happens after you die eventually took on a creepy science fiction bent — namely human head transplants.

While in search of just such a ghastly possibility for her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, author Mary Roach traveled to Cleveland and visited retired neurosurgeon Robert White. In the ’60s, White began experimenting with “isolated brain preparation,” a procedure in which a living brain was taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal’s circulatory system, and kept alive. In 1971, in what is either an absolute abomination or miracle of nature — we report, you decide — White cut the head off a monkey and connected it to the neck of a second, decapitated monkey. Then, in a series of complex medical procedures, he hooked up respiratory and circulatory supplies to the Frankenstein monkey. In a paper White wrote about the experiment, he said the monkey’s eyes “tracked the movement of individuals and objects in the room,” and when food was placed in its mouth, it “chewed it and attempted to swallow it.” White performed this procedure on several different monkeys, all of which died within six hours to three days.

When Roach asked White if he would ever conduct such an experiment using humans, he replied, “Of course. I see no reason why it wouldn’t be successful with a man.”

While the US has a slew of pesky regulations that would forbid such a procedure — at least so far — White believes he could easily perform a human head transplant in countries with less stringent regulations like Germany, England and Italy. Alas, there is still one major hurdle. Scruples? Morality? Humanity? Nah, money. “Who’s going to fund the research when the operation is so expensive and would only benefit a small number of patients?” White asked.

French surgeon Dr. Pierre Barbet conducted experiments in 1931 that some might consider decidedly immoral and unholy in an attempt to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, the linen cloth in which some believe Jesus was buried after he was taken down from the cross. For his research, Barbet procured an unclaimed corpse from a hospital and brought it back to his Paris laboratory. There, Barbet proceeded to nail the corpse to a homemade cross. He then raised the cross upright, and took various measurements of the slumping body to compare the angle of the arms and torso to the position in which Jesus’ body had theoretically been. In a book detailing his experiment, Barbet published a picture of the crucified corpse from the waist up. In later experiments, rather than wrestling an entire corpse, Barber nailed over a dozen arms onto his cross in an attempt to find a suitable point in the human wrist through which to hammer a nail.

The Body Farm

How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm? Easy, they’re dead. At the University of Tennessee, one can find at any given time about 40 human corpses, stuffed into car trunks, lying in the sun, buried in shallow graves, covered with brush or submerged in ponds. They’re part of the university’s Forensic Anthropology Facility, better known as “The Body Farm.” Retired forensic anthropologist William Bass started The Body Farm, which is located on a three-acre spread near the UT stadium surrounded by razor wire and a wooden fence, in 1971. Students and professors use the facility to study how decomposition affects the body’s organs and tissues.

The farm has also been long used to help law enforcement authorities and medical examiners pinpoint the time of death in real life crimes. In one recent experiment, researchers surgically inserted bullets into numerous corpses in an effort to develop bullets that would resist corrosion from the acids inside a dead body and help police solve long-ago crimes. Bodies come from a variety of sources — unclaimed corpses from medical examiners’ offices and outright donations. Over 300 people have willed their bodies to the facility, with more coming with each fresh wave of publicity.

Chill Out, Man

Cryogenics is the study of extremely cold temperatures, and in recent years the technology has been used to freeze the dearly departed in the hope that a cure for whatever did them in, including old age, will one day be found. One of the more notable of these human sno-cones is baseball legend Ted Williams, who is hanging upside down in a nitrogen-filled tank at a cryogenic plant in Arizona, waiting to be thawed out and put back into the game. Skeptics abound, including members of Williams’ family, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation where Williams, along with dozens of other corpses, resides has come under fire for fraud and quackery.

Not everyone’s post-life freezing is so high-tech. Example No. 1: Bredo Morstel. “Grandpa Bredo,” as he’s affectionately called, is packed on ice in a shed in Nederland, CO. Thousands of people from all over the country gather at Nederland every March for the three-day Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, where folks compete in coffin races, Grandpa Morstel look-alike contests, and pluck down $10 to tour the shed where Morstel resides.

Mortsel died in 1989, and his grandson, Trygve, had his body cryogenically frozen at an institute in California. Several years later, Trygve moved from Norway to the U.S. to build an earthquake, wind, bomb, fire and flood-proof house in Nederland. He decided to bring his frozen grandfather with him, and stored him in a shed behind his disaster-proof home. Trygve was longhaired, wild-eyed and outspoken, and believed that bathing in ice water and taking coffee enemas could prolong one’s life. He became a well-known character in the Boulder area and a bit of a troublemaker. In 1994 he was deported back to Norway, leaving his frozen grandfather behind.

When the Nederland town council discovered they had a frozen dead guy on their hands, an emergency meeting was held, and an ordinance was passed stating it was illegal to have “the whole or any part of the person which is not alive on one’s property.” The ordinance, however, did not cover Grandpa Bredo, who was, um, grandfathered in. Soon, the town of Nederland realized they had more than just a frozen dead guy on their hands — they had the makings of a great tourist trap. The town hired a local technician to keep Bredo’s temperature at 90 degrees below zero, and the ramshackle shed was replaced with a more presentable abode. Frozen Dead Guy Tours are given monthly, and the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival is now an annual event. For more information, check out www.frozendeadguy.com.

In The Name Of Science, Or At Least A Bigger Penis

The human cadaver has been used and misused — both willingly and unwillingly — for an amazing variety of endeavors, including medical and scientific research. When people donate remains for research, either their own or those of a family member, they have no idea what the remains will ultimately be used for. But when most people agree to make the ultimate altruistic gesture — to help find a cure for cancer, perhaps — they probably don’t envision that one day they may end up getting shot, used as a practice head for rhinoplasty or impaled on a steering column.

Roach explored all of these unusual practices while doing research for her book. One of the most cringe-inducing places she visited was a southern university medical center. There, she witnessed a neatly organized row of 40 severed human heads — which are the approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken, by the way — resting face-up on disposable aluminum frying pans. The heads were not being used to perfect some pioneering life-saving procedure, but rather for facial anatomy and face-lift refresher courses.

All the heads belonged to people who had died in the past few days, which allowed for “fresher, i.e. unembalmed, samples. It’s an upsetting and gruesome sight to behold even for some professionals, Roach wrote, so “physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.”

Although Roach is a firm believer in organ and tissue donations, after seeing surgeons perform nose jobs and liposuction on disembodied heads, she wondered if there ought to be a way for people to specify whether or not they want their remains to be used for cosmetic purposes. It’s a particularly salient question when you consider that purified cadaver skin is now used in penis enlargement surgery. In a procedure called Allograft Dermal Matrix Graft, layers of purified cadaver skin are inserted under the penile skin and on top of the erectile chambers to give the penis more thickness. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that some guy’s Johnson is a rather undignified final resting place.

Roach also paid a visit to Michigan’s Wayne State University, which has been conducting “impact research” in the name of automotive safety since 1939. In the beginning, brave and insanely dedicated researchers put themselves through a series of masochistic experiments, which included being slammed in the chest by a 22-pound pendulum and having a metal rod — with the benign-sounding name of “gravity impactor” — dropped on their faces. Eventually, the battered and bruised researchers wised up, and decided there had to be a better way. While plain old crash-test dummies were useful, they couldn’t relay specific information concerning how much impact real body parts could take, such as the maximum amount a rib cage could compress without causing injury to the inner organs. Or the amount of blunt trauma a human head could take before brain damage occurred. In other words, real bodies were needed.

So during the mid-’60s, Wayne State University began using bodies donated for medical research for a variety of “human impact tolerance studies.” Corpses, dressed in leotards and their heads covered in white hoods, were strapped into deceleration sleds and crashing automobiles, hit in the head with steel pendulums, sent through windshields and mowed down at mock intersections.

There was, as expected, some public outrage over these experiments, but researchers stressed that it was all done under strict regulations, and pointed out that they helped reduce the number of deaths and injuries on the highway. Today, the tolerance limits of the human body have been worked out, and dummies and computers largely stand in for corpses, although Wayne State still uses cadavers in select impact studies.

An impact study of a different sort was performed on human cadavers back in the early 1900s, but instead of cars, this experiment used guns and bullets. The U.S. Army Ordinance Department suspended numerous cadavers from the ceiling of the Frankford Arsenal firing range in Pennsylvania. The swinging cadavers were shot dozens of times with a variety of different charges (to simulate different distances) in an experiment designed to test one of the Army’s new rifles and its effects upon the human body.

The French and German armies had previously conducted similar “military wound ballistic studies.” Ironically, most of these grisly experiments were carried out for the humanitarian purposes of creating a weapon that could effectively incapacitate the enemy without killing or maiming them.

Now it’s a century later and similar studies are still taking place. At the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s Ballistic Missile Trauma Research Lab, cadavers were recently dressed in a new body armor vest and fired upon with a variety of weapons. The experiments were designed to test manufacturers’ life-saving claims before outfitting real troops with the protective body armor.

Ballistic studies, human crash-test dummies, plastic surgery refresher courses — such experiments on the dead continue to raise ethical and moral issues concerning whether or not people should be informed or given a choice of what is done with a donated body. There is no body of law that specifically addresses this issue, and as long as researchers have a signed agreement from the donor stating that he has willed his body to medical research, family members who object don’t have any real legal grounds for recourse. As Roach pointed out, “medical research” can sound so vague and relatively benign, but in reality, nearly all post-mortem experiments can seem gruesome. The question is, does the information gleaned from some of these experiments and research justify the means?

afterdeath@creativeloafing.com