I joined in, and the two of us blanketed the mixture down his neck and around his arms, almost tucking him in. “We’re making a little nest for him! It looks comfy,” Katrina said.
She stopped, scolding herself. “Dr. J wouldn’t want us to be this sentimental with the bodies. Cut it out, Katrina.”
I wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the day Dr. Johnston had told me a story about a man in his eighties who donated his body to FOREST. After he died, his wife and daughter drove his body to the facility in the family truck. They were even allowed to pick a spot in the underbrush for him. Then, only six months later, his wife died. She requested that her body be laid out in an area next to her husband. That request was honored, and man and wife decayed into the earth side by side, together as they had been in life. So much for no one being sentimental.
Dr. J was unapologetic in this attitude. “I like to call the donors ‘Mr. So-and-So’ or ‘Mrs. So-and-So.’ Call them by their real names. I don’t see a reason not to. It’s still them. Other facilities disagree with me and say it is not keeping professional distance. I totally disagree. It humanizes the bodies. I meet some of these people before they die. I know them. They’re people.”
Dr. J’s approach is part of a new wave in scientific donation practices, where a donor body is considered a person, not a nameless cadaver. Ernest Talarico, Jr., is the associate medical director at Indiana University School of Medicine–Northwest. Bodies are donated to his medical school to be dissected by young students in anatomy labs. When Talarico first started with the program, he found himself uncomfortable with the mind-set that the donor bodies were anonymous pieces of flesh, referred to only by numbers or nicknames.
Talarico set up a memorial service, held every year in January, for the program’s six donor bodies. In attendance are the first-year medical students and, astonishingly, the families of the donors. Rita Borrelli, who donated the body of her husband to Indiana University, was shocked to get a letter from the students saying they wanted more information on his life. “They even wanted pictures. I was crying so hard I could barely finish reading the letter.”
Participation by the family is optional, but allows the students to work through the almost insurmountable task for a modern doctor—honest conversation about death with a family. The students even call their donor body “their first patient.” In a profile of the program by the Wall Street Journal, first-year medical student Rania Kaoukis explained that “it would have been easier to think of the body as a number. But that isn’t what makes good doctors.”
With the advent of this enlightened outlook, I asked Dr. J if she would be donating her own body to the FOREST facility when she sloughed off her mortal coil. The answer was yes, in principle. But she was worried about her students. Knowing the donor’s personal history and referring to the body as Mrs. So-and-So was one thing. Watching your professor decompose before your very eyes was another. But Dr. J’s real barrier was her own mother. Her mother was wholly against the idea of the decomp facility, coming from a generation where a decent funeral meant a wake in a church. She wouldn’t donate her body if her mother was alive and uncomfortable with the idea.
Recently, however, Dr. J’s mom, musing on what she would like for her own body, announced, “I don’t understand why we have to go through this whole cremation or burial rigamarole. Can’t we just be brought out to the forest and allowed to decompose naturally?”
“Mom?” Dr. J replied.
“Yes, dear?”
“You know that’s what I do, right? That’s what the FOREST facility is? A place you decompose in the woods.”
Frank’s woodchip pile now rose three and half feet. It looked like a Viking burial mound. The strapping blond undergraduate hammered in a wire fence around the mound’s lower half to prevent the mulch mixture (or, God forbid, Frank) from escaping and rolling down the hill. This was a far cry from what the recomposition process would end up looking like in an urban setting, but with the birds and cicadas chirping and the speckled sunshine through the trees, I could only think that this would be the perfect place to putrefy.
The volunteer group, covered in sweat and wood dust, reentered the body pen. This time they were hauling water in recycled Tidy Cats litter containers. Twelve gallons were poured over the mound to create moisture to invite microbes and bacteria to the mix. As photos were taken to document the procedure, someone recommended removing the Tidy Cats labels so it wouldn’t appear as “Human composting, brought to you by Tidy Cats!”—an association neither side would relish.
Katrina looks to this portion of the process, when the water is poured on top of the mound, as a future ritual. She doesn’t want the Urban Death Project facilities to share modern crematories’ allergy to family involvement. She hopes that pouring the water on fresh woodchips will give the family the same sense of power as lighting the cremation pyre, pushing the button to start a modern cremation machine, or shoveling dirt onto the coffin. As we poured water onto Frank’s mound, it felt like ritual. It felt like the start of something, for Frank and perhaps for society.
AFTER EATING LUNCH at the town sports bar (we didn’t explain to the cheerful blond waiter why we were covered in woodchips), we returned to FOREST. Frank wasn’t the only reason we had come to the facility. There was still the matter of June and John Compost, the original donor bodies. Today we would uncover their mounds to see what, if anything, lay beneath.
Trudging back up the hill, Dr. J turned to Katrina and announced, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, the cadaver dogs completely ignored the mounds.” Katrina’s face lit up.