Things Your Body Can Do After You Die

Things Your Body Can Do After You Die





1. Get married

2. Unwind with a few friends

3. Tour the globe as a scandalous work of art

4. Fuel a city

5. Get sold, chop shop-style

6. Become a Soviet tourist attraction

7. Snuggle up with your stalker

8. Don’t spread an epidemic

9. Stand trial

10. Stave off freezer burn



From getting hitched to saving the environment, here’s proof you can still be a busybody long after you kick the bucket.



1. Get married



Death is no obstacle when it comes to love in China. That’s because
ghost marriage — the practice of setting up deceased relatives with
suitable spouses, dead or alive — is still an option.



Ghost marriage first appeared in Chinese legends 2,000 years ago, and
it’s been a staple of the culture ever since. At times, it was a way
for spinsters to gain social acceptance after death. At other times,
the ceremony honored dead sons by giving them living brides. In both
cases, the marriages served a religious function by making the deceased
happier in the afterlife.



While the practice of matchmaking for the dead waned during China’s
Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, officials report that ghost
marriages are back on the rise. Today, the goal is often to give a
deceased bachelor a wife — preferably one who has recently been laid to
rest. But in a nation where men outnumber women in death as well as in
life, the shortage of corpse brides has led to murder.



In 2007, there were two widely reported cases of rural men killing
prostitutes, housekeepers, and mentally ill women in order to sell
their bodies as ghost wives. Worse, these crimes pay.. According to The
Washington Post and The London Times, one undertaker buys women’s
bodies for more than $2,000 and sells them to prospective “in-laws” for
nearly $5,000.




2. Unwind with a few friends



Today, most of us think of mummies as rare and valuable artifacts, but
to the ancient Egyptians, they were as common as iPhones. So, where
have all those mummies gone? Basically, they’ve been used up. Europeans
and Middle Easterners spent centuries raiding ancient Egyptian tombs
and turning the bandaged bodies into cheap commodities.



For instance, mummy-based panaceas were once popular as quack medicine.
In the 16th century, French King Francis I took a daily pinch of mummy
to build strength, sort of like a particularly offensive multivitamin.
Other mummies, mainly those of animals, became kindling in homes and
steam engines.



Meanwhile, human mummies frequently fell victim to Victorian social
events. During the late 19th century, it was popular for wealthy
families to host mummy-unwrapping parties, where the desecration of the
dead was followed by cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.



3. Tour the globe as a scandalous work of art



Beginning in 1996 with the BODY WORLDS show in Japan, exhibits
featuring artfully flayed human bodies have rocked the museum circuit.
BODY WORLDS is now in its fourth incarnation, and competing shows, such
as Bodies Revealed, are pulling in $30 million per year. The problem
is, it’s not always clear where those bodies are coming from.



Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the man behind BODY WORLDS, has documented that
his bodies were donated voluntarily to his organization. However, his
largest competitor, Premier Entertainment, doesn’t have a
well-established donation system. Premier maintains that its cadavers
are unclaimed bodies from mainland China. And therein lies the concern.
Activists and journalists believe “unclaimed bodies” is a euphemism for
“executed political prisoners.”



The fear isn’t unfounded. In 2006, Canada commissioned a human rights
report that found Chinese political prisoners were being killed so that
their organs could be “donated” to transplant patients. And in February
2008, ABC News ran an exposé featuring a former employee from one of
the Chinese companies that supplied corpses to Premier Entertainment.
In the interview, he claimed that one-third of the bodies he processed
were political prisoners. Not surprisingly, governments have started to
take notice. In January 2008, the California State Assembly passed
legislation requiring body exhibits to prove that all their corpses
were willfully donated.




4. Fuel a city



Cremating a body uses up a lot of energy — and a lot of nonrenewable
resources. So how do you give Grandma the send-off she wanted and
protect the planet at the same time? Multitask.



Some European crematoriums have figured out a way to replace
conventional boilers by harnessing the heat produced in their fires,
which can reach temperatures in excess of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. In
fact, starting in 1997, the Swedish city of Helsingborg used local
crematoriums to supply 10 percent of the heat for its homes.



5. Get sold, chop shop-style





Selling a stiff has always been a profitable venture. In the Middle
Ages, grave robbers scoured cemeteries and sold whatever they could dig
up to doctors and scientists. And while the business of selling
cadavers and body parts in the United States is certainly cleaner now,
it’s no less dubious.



Today, the system runs like this: Willed-body donation programs, often
run by universities, match cadavers with the researchers who need them.
But because dead bodies and body parts can’t be sold legally, the
middlemen who supply these bodies charge large fees for “shipping and
handling.”



Shipping a full cadaver can bring in as much as $1,000, but if you
divvy up a body into its component parts, you can make a fortune. A
head can cost as much as $500; a knee, $650; and a disembodied torso,
$5,000.



The truth is, there are never enough of these willed bodies to meet
demand. And with that kind of money on the mortician’s table,
corruption abounds.



In the past few years, coroners have been busted stealing corneas,
crematorium technicians have been caught lifting heads off bodies
before they’re burned, and university employees at body donation
programs have been found stealing cadavers.



After UCLA’s willed-body program director was arrested for selling body
parts in 2004, the State of California recommended outfitting corpses
with bar code tattoos or tracking chips, like the kinds injected into
dogs and cats. The hope is to make cadavers easier to inventory and
track down when they disappear.




6. Become a Soviet tourist attraction



Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wanted to be buried in his family
plot. But when Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin insisted on putting
his corpse on public display in Red Square, creating a secular,
Communist relic.



Consequently, an organization called the Research Institute for
Biological Structures was formed to keep Lenin’s body from decay. The
Institute was no joke, as some of the Soviet Union’s most brilliant
minds spent more than 25 years working and living on site to perfect
the Soviet system of corpse preservation. Scientists today still use
their method, which involves a carefully controlled climate, a
twice-weekly regimen of dusting and lubrication, and semi-annual dips
in a secret blend of 11 herbs and chemicals.



Unlike bodies, however, fame can’t last forever. The popularity of the
tomb is dwindling, and the Russian government is now considering giving
Lenin the burial he always wanted.



7. Snuggle up with your stalker



When a beautiful young woman named Elena Hoyos died of tuberculosis in
Florida in 1931, her life as a misused object of desire began. Her
admirer, a local X-ray technician who called himself Count Carl von
Cosel, paid for Hoyos to be embalmed and buried in a mausoleum above
ground.



Then, in 1933, the crafty Count stole Elena’s body and hid it in his
home. During the next seven years, he worked to preserve her corpse,
replacing her flesh as it decayed with hanger wires, molded wax, and
plaster of Paris. He even slept beside Elena’s body in bed — that is,
until her family discovered her there.



In the ensuing media circus, more than 6,000 people filed through the
funeral home to view Elena before she was put to rest. Her family
buried her in an unmarked grave so that von Cosel couldn’t find her,
but that didn’t stop his obsession. Von Cosel wrote about Elena for
pulp fiction magazines and sold postcards of her likeness until he was
found dead in his home in 1952. Near his body was a life-size wax dummy
made to look just like Elena.



8. Don’t spread an epidemic



In the aftermath of natural disasters such as tsunamis, floods and
hurricanes, it’s common for the bodies of victims to be buried or
burned en masse as soon as possible. Supposedly, this prevents the
spread of disease.



But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), dead bodies have
been getting a bad rap. It turns out that the victims of natural
disasters are no more likely to harbor infectious diseases than the
general population. Plus, most pathogens can’t survive long in a corpse.



Taken together, the WHO says there’s no way that cadavers are to blame
for post-disaster outbreaks. So what is? The fault seems to lie with
the living or, more specifically, their living conditions. After a
disaster, people often end up in crowded refugee camps with poor
sanitation. For epidemic diseases, that’s akin to an all-you-can-eat
buffet.



9. Stand trial



In 897, Pope Stephen VI accused former Pope Formosus of perjury and
violation of church canon. The problem was that Pope Formosus had died
nine months earlier.



Stephen worked around this little detail by exhuming the dead pope’s
body, dressing it in full papal regalia, and putting it on trial. He
then proceeded to serve as chief prosecutor as he angrily
cross-examined the corpse. The spectacle was about as ludicrous as
you’d imagine.



In fact, Pope Stephen appeared so thoroughly insane that a group of
concerned citizens launched a successful assassination plot against
him. The next year, one of Pope Stephen’s successors reversed Formosus’
conviction, ordering his body reburied with full honors.



10. Stave off freezer burn



At cryonics facilities around the globe, the dead aren’t frozen
anymore. The reason? Freezer burn. As with steaks and green beans,
freezing a human body damages tissues, largely because cells burst as
the water in them solidifies and expands. In the early days of
cryonics, the theory was that future medical technology would be able
to fix this damage, along with curing whatever illness killed the
patient in the first place.



Realizing that straight freezing isn’t the best option, today’s
scientists have made significant advances in cryonics. Using a process
called vitrification, the water in the body is now replaced with an
anti-freezing agent. The body is then stored at cold temperatures, but
no ice forms.



In 2005, researchers vitrified a rabbit kidney and successfully brought
it back to complete functionality — a big step in cryonics research.
(It may help in organ transplants someday, too.)



But science has yet to prove that an entire body can be revived. Even
worse, some vitrified bodies have developed large cracks in places
where cracks don’t belong. Until those kinks get worked out, the hope
of being revived in the future will remain a dream.