A Daughter's Choice

My father became curmudgeonly, secretive, and bullheaded in his old age. He ignored lawyers' suggestions to create an estate plan, including future care for my mother, who had Alzheimer's, and to tell me his funeral arrangements. For years, I attempted to learn his wishes, and, with no help from him, I eventually realized I would have to make the decision on my own.

I knew Dad's thoughts about death, because after my brother's funeral, Dad confided to his nurse, "My son, my mother and my father, and my siblings are all life forces in the air around us." My father's body didn't need to be buried, I realized then. Instead, I would give it to medical science. A deep thinker and voracious reader, Dad was amazed at the medical revelations and miracles that his long life allowed him to witness. He could help humankind for generations to come. Also I knew that his spirit would soar and constantly guide me.

After I had determined what to do, I called the funeral director on Nantucket, where Dad lived, to check if he had ever submitted funeral plans. He said, "No, Carolyn, your parents have never called me." I informed him that I'd soon give him information about what to do with Dad's body when the time came.

Massachusetts has four medical schools taking donated bodies. I chose my alma mater, Boston University, which accepts only un-embalmed, whole-body donations within 24 hours of death. Families donate 45 bodies to BU annually, allowing students to delve into the gross anatomy of the body. "There's no replacing the actual cadaveric experience of dissecting a human body," Robert Bouchie, BU's anatomical gift coordinator and a licensed funeral director, told me. "We never have enough bodies. We change the ratio of students to cadavers when we don't."

There is no federal oversight of this body-broker business — a point I was reminded of last month when news broke that the director of the willed-body program at the University of California at Los Angeles and an associate had allegedly stolen and then sold parts from bodies donated to the medical school. But my faith in BU's whole-body donation program never wavered, no matter what I read about those at other universities. The school had treated me fairly while I earned two degrees there. I knew it would be as humane with my father.

Several years before Dad's passing, I completed BU's paperwork, asking for a Catholic burial for him once the school had finished with his body. Much of his life, he believed in that church's doctrines. Most religions consider body donations for medical education and research good and charitable acts.

In 1997, Dad died at Nantucket's hospital. Tearfully, I asked the nurse to call the local funeral director. BU sent a hearse to Nantucket's funeral home for my 91-year-old father. The university has no age limit. Bouchie recently told me that students there had just finished examining the body of a 107-year-old donor. BU rarely rejects body donors, not even obese or emaciated ones. However, it turns away people with AIDS, hepatitis A, B, or C, or those with any contagious disease or toxic property in their blood or bodies.

BU kept Dad's body in a 40-degree cooler for two months and then introduced it to dissection classes, which take place in a 65-degree lab. My father's bony body became an important teacher for those med students, who learned his occupation — he was a retired editorial writer for the Globe — his cause of death, and his age.

"We don't want students to become so desensitized that they don't recognize the person as a selfless, beautiful individual," Bouchie says. "They need to make the association so they'll respect and care for the bodies to the nth degree."

The medical school holds two memorial ceremonies a year. One is a nondenominational service for families and friends with sermons from a priest and a rabbi, and each donor is acknowledged; the other is for faculty, deans, and the 150 to 200 students who had contact with the bodies.

After a year, BU took Dad's body to the lovely, well-maintained Pine Hill Cemetery in Tewksbury. All four Massachusetts medical colleges share it.

My experience and BU's effusive letter of gratitude have encouraged my husband to want to donate his body. And I've instructed him that if whole-body donation was good enough for Dad and Mom — I later donated my mother's body to Georgetown University — then, naturally, it's good enough for me.