ANSWER: B. Somewhat ironically—since three of his signature roles were Harry Morgan, the world-weary fishing boat captain in To Have and Have Not; Charlie Allnut, the hard-drinking captain of a ramshackle tramp steamer in The African Queen; and the seriously nutty Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny—Bogie is the only one of these celebs whose cremains were not scattered over the water. They are interred in the Glendale branch of Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
The Eternal Alumni Club
Are you the kind of person who looks back on your undergraduate years as the best time of your life and wishes you could have stayed in college forever? Well, thanks to a new development in the realm of American higher education, your dream can now come true, in a manner of speaking.
You won’t exactly be enjoying toga parties or other fun-filled nights of frathouse binge drinking. As a matter of fact, you won’t be enjoying anything at all since you’ll be sealed up inside a stone wall. Still, you’ll never have to leave college again!
According to an article in the May 18, 2007, New York Times, a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities—including the University of Richmond, Notre Dame, the Citadel, and Hendrix College in Con-way Arkansas—are constructing on-campus columbaria: memorial walls designed to hold cremation urns. For a few thousand dollars, faculty or alumni can purchase a niche and “have their ashes maintained on campus in perpetuity.”
The practice seems to have originated at the University of Virginia. In 1991, a Charlottesville lawyer named Leigh B. Middleditch Jr.—a product of both Virginia’s undergraduate and law schools who wished to be buried on the grounds of his beloved alma mater—discovered that the university’s venerable graveyard was already full. After some lobbying and fund-raising, he managed to get a columbarium built in place of a cemetery wall. The 180 niches, priced at $1,800 apiece, quickly sold out.
Since then, at least a half dozen other institutions of higher learning have followed suit. Though the notion of going into the mortuary business strikes some educators as bizarre, others see it as a natural product of our modern age. “Many people don’t identify with their churches, or their churches don’t have cemeteries like they used to,” says one former college chaplain. “But people feel very connected to their colleges, and there are some beautiful places on campuses.”
The practice has benefits for the universities as well, which are always looking for new ways to raise money. The hope, as the article points out, is that “by building stronger bonds with alumni and their families,” a nice on-campus columbarium for postgraduate cremains “might lead to substantial donations.”
Hair Today, Memorial
Gemstone Tomorrow
Remember that old Superman TV show where the Man of Steel took a lump of coal and squeezed it until it became a diamond? Well, thanks to a company called LifeGem, something similar can now be done to your departed loved one.
Imagine turning your late hubby into a beautiful one-half-carat princess diamond and mounting him on a lovely pendant necklace that you can wear to your next dinner party! Or converting Grandpa into a handsome pair of diamond-studded cufflinks! You can even have the remains of your beloved pet tabby made into a “God Bless America” lapel pin!
For prices ranging from a mere $2,699 all the way up to $24,999 (depending on weight, color, and shape), LifeGem will take a lock of your loved one’s hair or a portion of his/her/its cremated ashes and convert this precious material into a high-grade synthetic “memorial diamond.” (Clearly, CorpseGem would be a more accurate name for the company, though we can certainly understand why they opted for LifeGem.) This miracle is accomplished through a unique four-step process that involves extracting carbon from the organic remains, subjecting it to intense heat, then placing the resulting graphite inside a special machine that “replicates the awesome forces deep within the earth.” Eventually, a rough diamond crystal is produced, which is then finished by expert diamond cutters to the customer’s specifications.
The diamonds are offered in a variety of cuts and colors. Of course, like natural diamonds, they are not absolutely flawless. But then again—in the words of one satisfied customer who gave her spouse the patented postmortem LifeGem treatment—neither was her late husband.
You’ll find lots more about LifeGem, including a handsome brochure, at www.lifegem.com.
GOING OUT IN VIKING STYLE
Leave it to the Vikings—the same folks who reputedly enjoyed drinking mead from human skulls—to come up with the manliest way of cremating someone. When one of their warriors died, he was loaded onto a dragon-prowed ship with his weapons, enough food and drink for the trip to Valhalla, and a sacrificed slave to keep him company. Then the boat was set afire.
Usually, the ship was burned on land, then buried under a mound of earth. Sometimes, however, it was towed out to sea before being torched—at least according to legend. Since blazing, waterborne wooden boats don’t leave any archaeological evidence, there is no actual proof of such a practice. Still, it is described in a number of Norse sagas. It is also memorably portrayed at the climax of the 1958 movie The Vikings, in which the ship bearing the slain chieftain, Einar, is set afloat, then ignited by a shower of flaming arrows fired from shore by his fellow warriors. No ax-wielding, seafaring marauder could ask for a more touching send-off.
Keith, Coke, and
Funerary Cannibalism
In her best-selling 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford attacks our national funeral habits—particularly our insistence on embalming and open-casket viewing—as nothing less than “barbaric.” This judgment seems a tad harsh, particularly when American mortuary customs are compared to those of certain other groups—the Fore tribe of New Guinea, for example. This aboriginal people practiced what anthropologists call “funerary cannibalism”: the ritual eating of dead family members as part of the grieving process.
Archaeological evidence suggests that funerary cannibalism dates all the way back to the Paleolithic era and persisted well into the modern age, not only among the Fore (who frequently came down with a mad-cow-like disease called kuru from eating human brains) but among other primitive people as well, such as another New Guinea tribe called the Gimi. According to Kenneth Iserson, author of the encyclopedic Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Galen Press, 1994), “In the Gimi ritual, relatives placed a dead man’s body on a platform, so that he could decompose…. His female relatives then dragged him off the scaffold, dismembered the corpse, and carried the pieces into the normally forbidden men’s hut. There they ate their portions over several days.” The Yanomamo tribe of the Amazon also reputedly practiced funerary cannibalism. When one of their children died, the parents held a funeral feast during which they consumed the little one’s entire body, including the bones, which were ground up, cooked, and mixed with plantain.
Shocking as it seems to modern sensibilities, the practice of funerary cannibalism springs from a deep and very human impulse: the desire to incorporate the essence of a loved one into your own body—to make the vanished family member a very literal part of yourself.
Maybe that’s what Keith Richards had in mind when he performed his own unique act of funerary cannibalism. Richards didn’t exactly eat the flesh of a dead relative. The hard-living guitarist for the Rolling Stones did something more in keeping with his wild-man reputation: he ingested his father’s remains as a drug.
In an interview with the British music magazine NME, Richards claimed that following the death and cremation of his father, Bert, in 2002, he mixed some of the old man’s ashes with cocaine and snorted them. The blend of cremains and coke “went down pretty well,” Richards observed. The tabloid press had a field day with the story (“Father Nose Best” was a typical headline).
Richards’s PR people issued immediate retractions, claiming that it was all just an April Fool’s joke. If Richards was, in fact, telling the truth (and it says something about his wild-man reputation that his claim seems perfectly credible), it’s possible that he wa
s simply experimenting with one of the few substances he had never tried before. But maybe—without even consciously knowing it—he was performing a rock-and-roll version of a primordial ritual: consuming (“with a little bit of blow”) the body of his departed ancestor.
Cryonic Preservation:
Cooling Your Heels
(Along with the Rest
of Your Anatomy) for
a Few Millennia
Once upon a time, young women of royal birth were occasionally killed by poisoned apples, preserved in glass coffins, and eventually brought back to life by handsome princes who happened to be wandering by Nowadays things are different. Thanks to enormous strides in the science of human refrigeration, we no longer have to depend on things like dwarf-constructed caskets and magical kisses. Instead we can turn to a sophisticated technique known as cryonic preservation, aka cryopreservation or simply cryonics (not to be confused with cryogenics, the branch of physics that studies very low temperatures).
In the simplest terms, cryonics consists of putting a dead person into an indefinite deep freeze in the hope that science will eventually come up with a way to thaw him out and revivify him. Though the concept can be traced back to science fiction stories of the 1930s, the person universally regarded as the driving force behind the contemporary cryonics movement is former physics professor Robert C. W. Ettinger.
In his influential book The Prospect of Immortality (self-published in 1962 and subsequently reissued by Doubleday), Ettinger argues that “most of us now breathing have a good chance of physical life after death—a sober, scientific probability of revival and rejuvenation of our frozen bodies.” While acknowledging that a few wrinkles remain to be ironed out—like, how exactly do you bring a long-frozen dead person back to life?—he expresses the utmost confidence that scientists of the future will possess not only the technological know-how but the active desire to resurrect us. “No matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us.”
Indeed, Ettinger is so optimistic about the future that he describes a “tired old man” of today placing himself in cryonic suspension and awakening centuries hence “with the physique of a Charles Atlas,” having been “rejuvenated while unconscious” by our benevolent “friends of the future,” who evidently will have nothing better to do than spend their time sprucing up and reanimating frozen corpses. Today’s cryopreserved dead, Ettinger insists, will wake up “young and virile” in “a wonderful world, a vista to excite the mind and thrill the heart.” They will “not merely be revived and cured, but enlarged and improved, made fit to work and play on a grand scale and in a grand style.” That the future might not turn out to be quite so rosy—that we might reawaken to find ourselves, say, caged in a futuristic petting zoo or trapped in some Matrix-like inferno where we serve as human battery packs for a race of malevolent machines—is a possibility that he fails to consider.
Body preservation, Grimm-style.
The process of cryonic suspension is exceptionally complicated—not just a matter of packing a corpse in ice and periodically refilling the cooler. In her book Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century (McFarland, 1996), Christine Quigley describes at some length the procedure performed on James H. Bedford, the world’s first human being to undergo voluntary cryopreservation.
At 6:30 P.M. on January 12, 1967, Bedford—a seventy-three-year-old retired psychology professor—died of lung cancer in a convalescent home in Glendale, California. At his bedside were members of the Los Angeles Cryonics Society (LACS), along with Bedford’s physician, Dr. B. Renault Able, who shared his patient’s interest in cryonics. After making the determination of death, Able
connected Bedford’s body to a heart-lung machine and flooded it with nutrients and oxygen to keep the brain from degenerating. He injected Bedford’s body with heparin to prevent the blood from clotting. With LACS member Dr. Dante Bruno, Able intravenously injected dimethyl sulfoxide to prevent ice crystals from forming in the body tissues. The men packed Bedford’s body in dry ice and turned off the heart-lung machine when the body temperature had reached near freezing.
By 2 A.M., the temperature of Bedford’s body had been lowered to −100°F, equal to that of dry ice. A horizontal cryogenic storage capsule manufactured by Cryocare Equipment Corporation was brought into the room. The stainless steel cylinder was seven feet long and had been constructed with double walls to insulate the body. Bedford’s frozen body was wrapped in aluminum foil, enclosed in a sleeping bag, and placed inside the capsule. The inner container was welded shut. The chamber was filled with liquid nitrogen, a liquefied gas with a temperature of about 320 degrees below zero, and within seconds Bedford’s tissues had become as brittle as glass.
1903 patent applications for a precryonics method of corpse preservation.
As you may imagine, turning a dead person into a human Popsicle—or a “corpsicle,” as Kenneth V Iserson so aptly puts it—isn’t cheap, particularly when you add in the expense of extended (if not eternal) maintenance and storage. Prices run from roughly $30,000 up to $120,000 for full-body cryopreservation, though you can save a bundle by opting for the head-only option, also known as “neurosuspension”—a procedure that received a great deal of publicity a few years back when it was revealed that the decapitated head of baseball immortal Ted Williams had been preserved apart from his body.
Needless to say, a great deal of controversy has surrounded cryonics from the start. Many scientists deride it as a form of high-tech quackery. “Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen,” says one eminent physician, “is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow.” Other equally prominent scientists, however, are not so quick to dismiss it, particularly in light of the rapid advances in fields such as nanotechnology that might—at least theoretically—make the resurrection of cryopreserved corpses possible in the far future.
Besides the issue of its feasibility other objections to the procedure have been raised. These range from the psychological (“How will I survive emotionally in the future without the people I love?”) to the ethical (“Won’t cryonics lead to the overpopulation of the earth?”) and the religious (“Doesn’t God intend for humans to die?”). Proponents, however, have carefully reasoned and persuasive answers to most of these questions. For example, your loved ones can also be cryonically preserved and join you in the future. (Alternatively, you can always make new friends.) As for concerns about overcrowding, the percentage of present-day people who can afford the procedure is so small that their future resurrection will have no impact on the world population. And while God might want us to die, who can say when? After all, according to the Bible, Noah lived 950 years and Methuselah even longer—969 years.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
The world’s foremost cryopreservation company is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Scottsdale, Arizona. Its website (www.alcor.org) not only describes the process in detail but also debunks the major “myths” surrounding cryonics and addresses, in a frank and sensible way, some of the problems that still attend the procedure. Another leading organization in the field is the Cryonics Institute of Clinton Township, Michigan, which maintains an equally informative website (www.crynonics.org) and publishes a bimonthly magazine for cryonics enthusiasts, the Immortalist. The American Cryonics Society of Cupertino, California (www.americancryonics.org) has been in existence since 1969. While offering a full cryonic suspension program, it does not have long-term storage facilities and contracts with other organizations, primarily the Cryonics Institute, for this service.
The single most comprehensive online source for information about cryonics is the website of self-declared “life-extensionist and inveterate scribbler” Ben Best (www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryonics.html). Deeply informed, exceptionally thorough, and highly readable, Best’s encyclopedic site not
only tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about cryonics (how it works, what it costs, etc.), but also addresses questions that would never occur to most people: Where does the soul go when a person is cryopreserved? Is it immoral to spend thousands of dollars to have your body frozen when people in poor countries are starving? How will reanimated people live in the future without marketable skills?
Ted Williams: Dead Head
If you’ve always wondered what a decapitated cryopreserved head looks like—at least as portrayed by one of America’s leading sculptors—now’s your chance to find out. In 2005, Daniel Edwards—controversial creator of such outlandishly amusing pieces as Monument to Pro-life: The Birth of Sean Preston (a naked Britney Spears down on all fours giving birth to a newborn), Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton (a topless and surprisingly well-endowed Hillary), and Suri Cruise’s First Poop (pretty much what it sounds like)—whipped up a storm of publicity with a work called The Ted Williams Memorial Display with Death Mask, from the Ben Affleck 2004 World Series Collection.
Presented as the ultimate sports collectible, this prankishly gruesome work consists of three lifelike sculptures that purport to be genuine plastic casts of the clinically severed head of the great Boston Red Sox slugger, made while Williams was “in cryonic slumber” (in reality, they were modeled on photographs of the living Williams). Each head is posed with a different piece of memorabilia: a 1941 Life magazine with Williams on the cover, a pair of 1950s cleats, and an autographed baseball.
You can see the work at various sites on the Web. For best results, type “Daniel Edwards” and “Ted Williams” at Google Image Search.
DEATH FUN FACT
The Whole Death Catalog Page 29