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It's official. The papers have been signed, witnessed, sealed, and delivered. When they finally pry the golf club, tennis racquet, or softball bat out of my cold, dead hands, my body will go to science. It's the gift of death. As I give out, I'll be giving back. My organs may be harvested for others to use (warning, harvesters: my heart may beat erratically, my kidneys may require frequent flushing), my head may be cut off for interns to use in practicing facelifts, my skin may be peeled to graft onto burn victims (warning, peelers: my skin is thin, mottled, and lacks resilience) or used cosmetically to plump up wrinkles (apparently the product of wrinkles times wrinkles is smoothness, the way that -1 times -1 equals + 1). I may become a crash test dummy, my eyeballs may be pounded by baseballs to help determine safe compression levels for Little Leaguers--who knows? It's all good! Use me, abuse me, I'm pretty sure I won't care. Maybe my donated corpse will help make up for all that I didn't contribute to Jerry's muscular dystrophy kids on those Labor Day telethons.
An added bonus is that there'll be no fuss, no muss, for my next of kin. The disposal service is cost-free and labor unintensive. All someone has to do is call 911, get me legally pronounced dead, then call the Science Care people, who will come get me, assess me, and apportion me as they in their wisdom see fit. Eventually, after all of my usable parts have been incorporated into someone else or been practiced on or beaten up, my new caregivers will cremate me. Since I opted not to have my cremains made available to my next of kin, no one will even have to bury or scatter my ashes.
Lacking a grave with headstone, or an urn, will there be any reminders that I was ever an earthling? For a while, yes. My DNA will live on in my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I look like my dad; my sons are often told that they look like me. I have a few of his mannerisms, values, and attitudes; my children have a few of mine. I occasionally think of my dad and mom; my children will occasionally think of me. In time, however, a few generations, say, my genetic influence will have become so watered down that it will be like a wee dram of single-malt Scotch dropped into the Pacific Ocean. My effect on students that I've taught, players that I've coached, friends that I've known, is waning day by day and will certainly die when they do. My possessions and pictures of me will be dispersed and eventually lost or thrown away. (I have my grandparents' old Morris chair and the coin changer my grandfather used when he drove bus for the Suburban Transportation System; I have pictures of my parents, I have my dad's ring, a tape of his trio playing for a dance in Seattle, his metronome, his ocarina. How long will these last after I'm gone?) It's more than highly doubtful that anyone will ever hire a genealogist to trace my history through a search of legal documents. I'll have no biographers. My accomplishments, such as they are, will be forgotten, and any archived records of them--the basketball championships, the coaching awards, the columns I wrote for the Edmonds Tribune-Review--will eventually wither away. My website writing will vanish into cyberspace. Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" concludes "So long as man can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this and this gives life to thee"--but I have never written any lines that will live as long as mankind, nor have any ever been written about me. Astro-physicists say that I am an organization of elements that were created in the explosions of stars, but after Science Care is through with me, I will be thoroughly disorganized, my elements returned to the cosmos, my quarks and quirks no longer comprising "me." Or will there be some sort of resurrection or reincarnation? Is there a me independent of the electrical-chemical processes of my brain, a consciousness, a self, a soul that endures and will assume a new form? I do not know. It amuses me to note that those who believe in an afterlife will eventually find out if they are right but not if they are wrong, while those who do not believe in an afterlife will find out if they are wrong but not if they are right. Believers and non-believers alike must wait and see--or not see.
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