Dead Reasoning

I hate my body. It brings me down.

Please, don’t misunderstand me now. I’m not talking about how I look. Appearance has little bearing on my attitude, but not in the way you might think.

Generally I am well-groomed, but not necessarily fashionable. You might think, if you saw me, that I could lose a few pounds around the middle, or do something stylish with my hair, maybe even wear a little makeup. I’m telling you, no matter what I do or what I say or what I wear, none of it will make me feel any different. The way I see it, this body of mine just doesn’t do my mind any justice. It doesn’t reflect who I am on the inside.

I’m cerebral. Zada will attest to this. Zada’s my flat mate. She reads Tarot for a living. Don’t scoff now! It pays her university tuition (intuition?), which she attends part-time. She reads me all the time, in more ways than just Tarot. She tells me I’m a devout and adamant Aries, the astrological sign which rules the head, that astrological personality which is plagued with fevers and migraines. (This is true by the way!) Ask Zada and she’ll tell you I just brood. She says I get so wrapped up in my head that I often make myself sick. That’s the plight of an Aries, I guess.

Now where was I? Oh yeah! I hate my body. I can see how that could be misinterpreted. So let me explain the precedent for this particular statement.

Sometimes Zada invites some of her university friends over for “gatherings”, aka “informal parties”, of which I am not overly fond, as I detest the deplorable high language used by any educational institution and its minions who labour to mimic the minds of genius. Don’t mind my bitterness. I merely envy their scholarly discipline, a skill that evades me still. Combine that with the fact that I feel about two inches tall when Zada’s friends get into their tête-à-tête parlour games. Consequently, I get quite hostile to disguise my lack of self-esteem.

The other night they were yackety-yakking about a number of varying topics. The topic that stuck with me was the one about funerals: When you die, do you want to be cremated or buried? Albeit not a pleasant conversation for most people, but its morbidity peaked my interest. Zada shrieked with delight, but then anything that even hints at the possibility of discussing death and the great cosmic beyond thrills her.

Urgently I explained to them, no matter your choice, eventually you’re buried. Unless your relatives plan to keep your ashes in some fancy pot on their dust-free fire mantle or some sun-lit window still, it’s in the ground you go, or you’re cast to the winds or sprinkled in the sea, where you return to the ground eventually. There was a moment of silent, beer-sipping rumination, after which they reconsidered their platform: In what manner do you want your body to be disposed?

Of course, being university students and supposedly having this broad sense of awareness uneducated people like myself don’t have, most of them opted for cremation. Taking into account the increasing population, cremation is the more economical choice, space-wise that is. Also, it is a method, they explained, that is more considerate toward the environment. Yeah. Right. Like I wonder what crap spills out of those crematorium chutes and into the air? I can just see the headlines in the year 2020: NEW ALLERGEN DISCOVERY – HUMAN ASH FALLOUT. A whole generation sneezing the remains of their deceased beloved ones into a tissue only to flush them down the toilet. Anyway, I digress. (Just a sec, bathroom break!)

Surprisingly, Zada did not want to be cremated. She explained, in a very deep and grim voice, that she wanted to be buried in tact; she wanted no embalming fluids to slow down her transformation. She wanted her body to decay quickly and putrefy, so it could seep through the seams of her cheap pine casket and into the damp soil. Needless to say, a couple of her so-called university friends sneered with disgust at her visceral description.

I, myself, wanted to run away. What was this horrible explicit gore Zada was spouting? I shuddered to think that I lived with her, that she slept in the next room to me. I envied her. Why couldn’t I have thought and said something just as revolting? Grotesque and somewhat out of character Zada’s idea seemed, decomposition was the more natural way of disposal. If she had have explained the cycle of life returning to the earth to renew the soil in a new age lingo, everyone would have laughed at her. If she explained the fertilization process in scientific jibe, they wouldn’t have believed her – she’s not a scientist!

Then it was my turn. Cremation or burial in tact? Neither, I told them.

Silence. Then someone asked, What do you mean by that?

Throughout the course of their conversation, one thought picked at my brain, an observation that pretty much goes like this: These people are rather attached to their corpses. Let’s face it, when you’re dead, I think your concerns will be about your spirit (if you believe in that sort of thing), not your body. Me? I couldn’t care a less about my body now; why would I care about my corpse? Like I said, I hate my body. It doesn’t reflect who I am on the inside. Look at Zada! Who would have thought this love-nature-and-get-into-harmony-with-the-cosmos girl could say something so morose.

Someone finally whines about my reply: Well, it has to be one or the other. It just has to! Neither.

Whenever existential topics about death arise (how often is that?!), I merely say that I will neither be buried nor cremated. Instead, I’m donating my body to science. And I explain, I wouldn’t be polluting the air with ash or the ground with putrescence, and in the end, someone could learn about my internal workings. That’s satisfying enough for me.

One of them muttered something to the effect, You’ve been thinking about this awhile, haven’t you? I just shrugged my shoulders. My detached opinion of my body made them uncomfortable, which in turn made me feel awkward, so I said no more. After a while their beer saturated brains began creating futuristic alternative methods of disposal: caskets shot into outer space and deserted islands nuked with a-bombs—the ultimate crematorium with radioactive human ash fallout. Somehow I failed to stay absorbed by this creative tangent and quickly retreated to my bedroom.

Afterward, Zada, sitting on the edge of my bed, the light from the hallway spilling into the dark of my bedroom and casting a yellow aura about her, declared that what I had said was pretty cool. I believed her. She’s not the type to lie. I told her I didn’t feel cool and that there was fault to my reasoning.

She batted her lashes, her nonverbal expression of here-we-go-again.

There was a flawed reasoning behind my method of disposal. I knew it then and only said it to be different. But, in the darkness of my room, I realized I truly wasn’t.

You see, I still want to donate my body to science. I’d like for someone to learn from something that I have no use for. The thought that someone will slice me open to look at my insides, that does my mind some justice. But they couldn’t possibly use every single part of me. This is where my reasoning died.

The leftovers, all those pieces that go unexamined, will probably be melted down with a chemical corrosive and then cremated, which, in all likelihood, will be more dangerous to the environment then a regular cremation, which brings me back to my original argument: No matter what your funeral preference, whether anatomically dissected or cremated, when you’re dead someone has to bury what’s left of you. Eventually you return to the ground.

What bothers me most, is that after all this funerary exploration, I am left with one understanding. I have given the subject quite a bit of consideration, more than I care to admit. That I am still thinking about what happens to my body after I die, makes me just as attached to it as Zada and her friends are to theirs. My body reflects little of who I am, and yet I expect my corpse to reflect more. Where’s the logic in that?

Now, I hate my body even more.

(Damn, the injustice!)

Originally published in MagMyr: The Resurrection, Vol VI, 2000.
© Cathrene Gehue, 2000