Take My Body Please

It's an Associated Press story about Robert George's unclaimed body in University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital.  The coroners in Fayette county where the hospital is located say the body should be handled by the coroner in Pulaski county where Mr. George lived.  The Pulaski county coroner says that possession is nine-tenth of the law, the body is the responsibility of Fayette county.  Relatives were contacted, but nothing has happened for 3 months.  The hospital asked a judge to decide.

There's plenty of humor to be mined here from the childish "He's yours"  "No, he's yours.  You had him last." to plays on the "Whose going to take uncle Robert now?" question which has become more common as medicine has extended our lifetimes.

Still, what does it mean that relatives won't claim a body.  Was he so disliked?  Is it just economic?  I got an insight into poverty in an NPR piece just before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans:  the reporter said that some people didn't have the money to get out of town.  How could that be?  Who could be so poor?  I can't remember whether it was bus fare, gasoline money, or transportation in general (packing up household goods and renting a truck), but to not have get-out-of-town money stunned me.

The dateline on the story is yesterday, so the questions about family will remain unknown unless it becomes fodder for a book, investigative journalism, or maybe it will show up in the court records after a judge chooses the lucky coroner.

With medical schools short of cadavers I would have thought that an enterprising school would contact the relatives to offer to take the body.  (Note to self: business idea: contract with medical schools as a cadaver finder.)

 Of course, the question of the body, the mortal remains, is one which has enthralled theologians and perplexed the rest of us.  There's the whole business of religious obligations/expectations.  I believe Orthodox Jews and Muslims want the body interred immediately.  Others put the body on display.  In some cases the display was to show that the deceased had not died as the result of foul play.

Cremation, which horrifies Muslims, is the preferred way for a lot of us.  (In a documentary about the famous folk group,The Weavers, Will Hayes joked that he used to sing about share croppers and now, referring to the neighbors who helped him with his garden, he said, "I have some myself."  Hayes ashes were interred in his compost pile.)

Years ago, the brother of an uncle buried his mother almost immediately.  The family felt that he was so quick about it because of a life-long animosity between the brother and his mother.  By all accounts the mother was a difficult personality.  When she died, he literally wanted to be rid of her.

I didn't understand it.  I liked my parents.  The drama of other family's was not ours: no screaming or yelling, chasing one another with knifes, smashing things, drunken rages, squealing tires, or mysterious disappearances.  Nope.  None of that.  We sulked and gave other hard or annoyed looks. You'll have to look else where for domestic drama inspiration.

It was only on experiencing how draining it is caring for people in long term decline that I got it.  Intellectually I understood it, but to get it I needed a closer association.  After many years, caring adult children, wishing no ill to their parents, are relieved when the parent finally die.  The trips to the hospital, the time coaxing parents to take medicine, act normal ("Please get dressed."  "Please take a bath."  "Tell me what hurts."), administering to physical needs, puts the rest of their life, the part that fills the pages of novels, in second place.

The grandchildren, the presumed center of the world, find the spotlight less constant, the parent/child in the middle faces a difficult balancing act for which there is no right solution.

Relief at the parent's death is compounded with guilt: should they have done things differently?  Could something have been done earlier?  In my family, putting off an elective surgical procedure contributed to an uncle's long decline.  After a time his general health precluded an operation and other related problems developed.