The Absurdity—And Difficulty—Of Writing About The Dead

The following is an excerpt from Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.

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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

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There are those who will disagree with me, who feel that to do anything other than bury or cremate the dead is disrespectful. That includes, I suspect, writing about them. Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is. Being dead is absurd. It’s the silliest situation you’ll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about ­it.

This book is not about death as in dying. Death, as in dying, is sad and profound. There is nothing funny about losing someone you love, or about being the person about to be lost. This book is about the already dead, the anonymous, ­behind-​­the-​scenes dead. The cadavers I have seen were not depressing or ­heart-​­wrenching or repulsive. They seemed sweet and ­well-​­intentioned, sometimes sad, occasionally amusing. Some were beautiful, some monsters. Some wore sweatpants and some were naked, some in pieces, others ­whole.

All were strangers to me. I would not want to watch an experiment, no matter how interesting or important, that involved the remains of someone I knew and loved. (There are a few who do. Ronn Wade, who runs the anatomical gifts program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, told me that some years back a woman whose husband had willed his body to the university asked if she could watch the dissection. Wade gently said no.) I feel this way not because what I would be watching is disrespectful, or wrong, but because I could not, emotionally, separate that cadaver from the person it recently was. One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one. The dead of science are always strangers.

Let me tell you about my first cadaver. I was ­thirty-​­six, and it was ­eighty-​­one. It was my mother’s. I notice here that I used the possessive “my mother’s,” as if to say the cadaver that belonged to my mother, not the cadaver that was my mother. My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull. Or that was how it seemed to ­me.

It was a warm September morning. The funeral home had told me and my brother Rip to show up there about an hour before the church service. We thought there were papers to fill out. The mortician ushered us into a large, dim, hushed room with heavy drapes and too much ­air-​­conditioning. There was a coffin at one end, but this seemed normal enough, for a mortuary. My brother and I stood there awkwardly. The mortician cleared his throat and looked toward the coffin. I suppose we should have recognized it, as we’d picked it out and paid for it the day before, but we didn’t. Finally the man walked over and gestured at it, bowing slightly, in the manner of a maître d’ showing diners to their table. There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was ­closed-​­coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic carwash and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly ­polite.

The mortician told us we had an hour with her, and quietly retreated. Rip looked at me. An hour? What do you do with a dead person for an hour? Mom had been sick for a long time; we’d done our grieving and crying and saying goodbye. It was like being served a slice of pie you didn’t want to eat. We felt it would be rude to leave, after all the trouble they’d gone to. We walked up to the coffin for a closer look. I placed my palm on her forehead, partly as a gesture of tenderness, partly to see what a dead person felt like. Her skin was cold the way metal is cold, or glass.

A week ago at that time, Mom would have been reading the Valley News and doing the Jumble. As far as I know, she’d done the Jumble every morning for the past ­forty-​­five years. Sometimes in the hospital, I’d get up on the bed with her and we’d work on it together. She was bedridden, and it was one of the last things she could still do and enjoy. I looked at Rip. Should we all do the Jumble together one last time? Rip went out to the car to get the paper. We leaned on the coffin and read the clues aloud. That was when I cried. It was the small things that got to me that week: finding her bingo winnings when we cleaned out her dresser drawers, emptying the fourteen individually wrapped pieces of chicken from her freezer, each one labeled “chicken” in her careful penmanship. And the Jumble. Seeing her cadaver was strange, but it wasn’t really sad. It wasn’t her.

What I found hardest to get used to this past year was not the bodies I saw, but the reactions of people who asked me to tell them about my book. People want to be excited for you when they hear you are writing a book; they want to have something nice to say. A book about dead bodies is a conversational curveball. It’s all well and good to write an article about corpses, but a ­full-​­size book plants a red flag on your character. We knew Mary was quirky, but now we’re wondering if she’s, you know, okay. I experienced a moment last summer at the checkout desk at the medical school library at the University of California, San Francisco, that sums up what it is like to write a book about cadavers. A young man was looking at the computer record of the books under my name: The Principles and Practice of Embalming, The Chemistry of Death, Gunshot Injuries. He looked at the book I now wished to check out: Proceedings of the Ninth Stapp Car Crash Conference. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was all there in his glance. Often when I checked out a book I expected to be questioned. Why do you want this book? What are you up to? What kind of person are ­you?

They never asked, so I never told them. But I’ll tell you now. I’m a curious person. Like all journalists, I’m a voyeur. I write about what I find fascinating. I used to write about travel. I traveled to escape the known and the ordinary. The longer I did this, the farther afield I had to go. By the time I found myself in Antarctica for the third time, I began to search closer at hand. I began to look for the foreign lands between the cracks. Science was one such land. Science involving the dead was particularly foreign and strange and, in its repellent way, enticing. The places I traveled to this past year were not as beautiful as Antarctica, but they were as strange and interesting and, I hope, as worthy of ­sharing.

Excerpted from Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Copyright © 2021 by Mary Roach. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.