What happens after we die?

Thursday 21 June 2018

My apologies: yes, this is another post about death. But I promise it will be the last one for a while.

Yesterday my mother-in-law, Maria, was buried. It was a traditional Catholic burial, just as she would have wanted, her body interred near where she lived most of her life, in a short and simple ceremony.

Earlier in the week there had been a small but moving funeral service, complete with a professional choir performing excerpts from Fauré's Requiem. Clara, who organised most of it, had done her mother proud (see previous posts the call and a peaceful passing). 

In truly morbid self-indulgence (or, as I prefer to view it, forward thinking pragmatism), all this ceremony got me thinking: what would I like to happen to my body after I die?

Aside from somewhat impractical alternatives, like the Zoroastrian tradition of leaving the corpse on top of a hill to be devoured by vultures, these days there are normally two choices of what to do with the body of a deceased person: burial and cremation.

Often this is a religious decision: in Judaism, Islam and many Christian denominations, burial is traditional. In Buddhism and Hinduism, cremation is the norm. For those who are not especially religious, plus many modern Christians, cremation is popular: it's certainly more practical in an increasingly crowded planet, and an urn of ashes is more versatile than a coffin.   

So which option do I want?     

I prefer a third option: to donate my body to medical science. 

I’ve been an atheist since about the age of eight and a little thing like Parkinson’s isn’t going to change my views that easily. I remember the epiphany... sitting cross-legged on the hard wooden floor in morning assembly at primary school, we were singing Lord of the Dance when a thought suddenly occurred to me: what if God, like Father Christmas, was created by people, rather than the other way round?

Given that I don’t believe in life after death, that I have an incurable disease of the brain and that I have already benefitted much from medical science, I feel it is the least I can do to give something back.

Maybe my brain may be used for cutting edge research into Parkinson’s. Or perhaps my body will be butchered by some trainee doctor practising her scalpel skills.  Either way is fine by me. I don’t believe in a body having any higher value after death so it may as well be put to some earthly good. 

As is my habit, I started doing a bit of research into the subject. 

It turns out that, in the UK at least, it is not so easy to just say in your Will that you want to donate your body and then for it to magically happen.       

The basic problem is that by the time the Will is read, it's often too late to be able to use the body. Instead, it's necessary to make arrangements in advance with a local teaching hospital who may even ask for the donor to bear some of the cost of transporting the corpse. In my case, brain donation is also a possibility, leaving my grey matter to a neurology research department.  It's all overseen by the Human Tissue Authority, if you're interested in that sort of thing... 

After trawling the Internet for a while, I decided it was all getting a bit too complicated and instead took a simpler alternative: I registered for organ donation and chose to leave it at that for the foreseeable future. 

As I've said in this blog, life is for living, and certainly not for obsessing over death.  I will defer all the practicalities of body or brain donation to a much later date. And I'll stop blogging about death and start focussing on life for a while.

As for Maria, her body now lies in the ground but, in her world view, her soul is already in heaven. 

At her funeral service there was a beautiful rendition of In Paradisum from the end of Fauré’s Requiem as her coffin was carried from the solemn interior of the church out into the brilliant midsummer sunshine. Sung in Latin, the words translate as: 

   May the angels lead you into paradise:
   may the martyrs receive you at your coming, 
   and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. 

   May the choir of angels receive you, 
   and with Lazarus, who once was poor, 
   may you have everlasting rest.

Sometimes I wish I were a believer...

May she rest in peace.