Brain Donation is Needed to Study Autism. I registered to be an organ donor, assuming that if anyone would have a need for it, they should go for it. But somehow this feels different. My body going into the ground without my pancreas or spleen seems fine. But without my brain in my head? That creeps me out. It's irrational, I know. Still, I am considering it, because as someone who has some combo of OCD/Aspie/Anxiety symptoms with a high IQ, there might be useful things to look at. In reality, researchers would probably look at something else completely unremarkable about me and I would just look wrong under the ground.
I think you don't tell people that for the wake. It's one thing to think "They sent his spinal column and his kidneys up to Mary Hitchcock for a study." Quite another to look at the face and go "They cut his brain out of that. They filled it up with styrofoam or something for the viewing."
7 comments:
Will the jar have wires coming out of it?
I'm actually considering donating the whole thing to medicine. I find I don't have any particular feelings about what happens to my remains. It seems irrelevant, especially given that there's nothing particularly attractive about any of the possibilities.
I don't think there's any way of eliminating the "creep factor" of the physical presence of the dead; there'll always be someone who finds any form deeply unsettling, even if it's as tidy as an urn of ashes.
For a fictitious society, I made up a funerary practice of keeping a "mori" (from 'memento mori,' a reminder of death). Cremation ashes were worked into glass, giving a thing like a sparkly glass paperweight. It was usually engraved, at least in the manner of a headstone, sometimes also with a flattering portrait of the deceased or a bit of eulogy. I figured it was the kind of thing some relatives would treasure with arguably morbid sentimentality while others would wait for an occasion to bury it in the back yard on a moonless night.
This sounds like an exercise in futility.
Earl, I think family prefers either stone or fire/air. Solid, or "off into nothingness." If it's going to be glass, it had better be ceramic or corningware.
Note I never said this was a *good* idea. My fictitious societies aren't utopias. Ceramic sounds like a good idea. That way, you don't have to look at the ash particles suspended in glass.
Suspending the ashes in glass sounds rather nice to me. I have a lot of ashes around here that I've never quite managed to dispose of.
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