After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver

Introduction

1 No matter how healthily you eat, how much you deny your sedentary desires in the name of fitness, no matter how many sacrifices you make to the great god of longevity, you are going to die. Simon Critchley, “How to Make It in the Afterlife” I knew that everybody had to die sometime, but I always felt that an exception would be made in my case. William Saroyan Introduction My stepbrother died in 1973 at age thirty-nine. He was a flamboyant criminal trial lawyer and, true to his character, he left unusual instructions for his funeral arrangements. He wanted a New Orleans–style funeral in Trenton, New Jersey. His widow was to wear white. During the wake in the funeral home, a Dixieland band was to play jazz. On the day of the burial, the band was to lead the procession out of the funeral home. My stepfather, a traditional Italian padrone di casa, was scandalized. He objected strenuously to his son’s unconventional funeral arrangements . The widow, my stepsister in law, wanted to fulfill her late husband ’s wishes. After soul-searching and counsel, the widow and the father agreed to implement all of my stepbrother’s instructions. A Dixieland band provided the loud background music for the otherwise somber wake and funeral procession. I didn’t like Dixieland jazz, but I certainly admired my stepbrother’s characteristic flair, as well as his determination to leave his signature on the disposal of his remains. The recollections of that funeral, and of its star, are indelible. That intrafamily disagreement over funeral arrangements tweaked my law-related curiosity. As a then young lawyer interested in medicolegal matters, I wondered who had legal control in such a funeral controversy . Who would have had the ultimate say if the deceased’s widow and father hadn’t reached an accommodation? And no matter who was 2 | Introduction ultimately responsible, was there a legal duty to follow the decedent’s instructions, no matter how bizarre? If there was such a duty, did that mean that cadavers have rights? What other rights could a cadaver have—beyond having its predecessor’s wishes carried out? If cadavers have rights, who enforces them? Twenty-nine years later, in July 2002, another funeral controversy rekindled my interest in the issues surrounding the disposition of corpses. Ted Williams, one of the all-time greats of major league baseball, died at age eighty-four. There was no memorial service. His son, John Henry Williams, arranged to have his father’s corpse frozen in dry ice and flown to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor, a cryonics facility, would arrange to have the body permanently frozen, ready for restoration whenever science mastered the technique of revivifying and restoring dead human beings. John Henry purportedly wanted to give his father “a new chance at life.”1 Ted Williams’s daughter, Bobby Jo Ferrell, went to court to try to prevent the cryonic disposition that her brother was arranging. She relied on a 1996 will in which Ted Williams had asked to be cremated, with his ashes to be scattered over the Florida Keys, where he had spent so many happy times fishing. Ms. Ferrell believed that her father had never wanted to be frozen. She claimed that her brother only wanted to preserve her father’s DNA in order to sell it to baseball fan parents who dream of having sons capable of batting .400 in the major leagues. Al Cassidy, the executor of Ted Williams’s will, was happy to be guided by a court as to what to do in the face of the family dispute. He waited for a judicial hearing. John Henry, acting together with another sibling, Claudia Williams, produced a handwritten scrap of paper on which Ted Williams had in 2001 purportedly indicated a wish for a cryonic disposition. After a handwriting expert verified Ted Williams’s signature on the note, Al Cassidy entered into a court-supervised agreement that allowed the body to be permanently frozen at Alcor. Bobby Joe Ferrell relented, not because she thought that her father had really wanted to become a frozen remnant (a corpsicle), but because she had no more money to contest the case. No one else sought to rein in John Henry Williams. Ted Williams’s corpse (or at least its head) is now suspended in a large metal cylinder at Alcor.2 Far from the Florida Keys, he hangs in [18.222.179.186...