Excerpt 2 from: The Stone is a Riddle My father’s will states that he wants his body donated to science. I could be impressed by his generous nature and his desire to help out others less fortunate than himself. Or I could be sceptical and suggest that he just doesn’t want to pay for his own disposal. There is a more pragmatic logic behind his decision though. Digger makes things and pulls them apart. His world is one of mechanical trading and he’s had bits of his body supplemented by hardware (metal pins along his saw-bladed finger, replacement hip joints) or re-tuned with machines (laser-carved corneas). His world outlook is not tuned into biology and the organic nature of life. He has a command-and-control kind of mentality according to which body parts can be lopped off or amended or swapped between individuals. And he’s of the war generation that believes in fixing things or accumulating them, not throwing them away. No sentimental stuff; just a straightforward ‘get on with it’ approach. As a consequence, every time the topic of death has come up with Digger, I get: ‘I don’t give a bugger what happens; I’ll be dead, won’t I? Bury me under the bloody lemon tree, good nitrate source if nothing else.’ With that, my brain just wanders off. Source, sauce, just what kind of sauce goes with lemons? If Burt Munro liked pissing on his lemon tree every morning in The World’s Fastest Indian, why wasn’t he buried there? Is it really feasible? What local authority limitations might there be about this? If I did put his body beneath the citrus tree, how long before anyone notices he’s missing? So tempting. Tempting, too, to just let the whole subject of donating his body lie. But not me. No – I try and sort things out now before I have to sort them out later. When Audrey died I was caught off guard and spent days trying to do what was needed when I hadn’t a clue. Not with Digger; I couldn’t bear any indecision with him. Short and certain is what I’m seeking, so I do what I’m good at – I start investigating. This is not an exercise undertaken wholly out of curiosity; part of me needs the relief of being able to hand him over to someone else, even if that’s when he’s a bag of bones. Part of me wants to show the old buzzard that once again his assumptions about the situation are wrong. Not just to show him that he’s wrong, but to do so with irrefutable evidence. The streak of his belligerence in me wants him to admit that he’s wrong because I’ve never heard him acknowledge it in his life. Ever. In our family, Mum used to describe the gene mix by referring to the flat heads and the pointy heads. Flats have squarish craniums and broad faces: Mum, my brother Kelvin and I. The pointies have narrower faces and noses: Digger, my brothers David and Vaughan, and my sister, Cath. But that’s not the only split. Some of us are wrong, or often confess to it when we haven’t been, and some of us are never wrong. And a different, but related split: some of us can’t lie to save ourselves and some of us rationalise lies as just another form of truth. My friend Cath is the only person I know who has met all of my siblings. She connects us by the commonality of the eyes – hazel eyes that glitter when we get ideas. The thing is that when you catch someone’s eye you expect them to be telling you the truth. In my family you get that, it’s just that sometimes their truth occupies a broad flexible zone between fiction and fact. Digger has grey eyes and I need to know if they can be plucked, post-death, for their corneas. There’s something savagely sensible, albeit Biblical, about that thought. Let’s see, there might be two options: the whole body or parts of it. Let’s start small and work up. There are limitations on how old your body bits can be if they are to be accepted for organ donation. On the New Zealand organ donation website they list them in order of exclusion top to bottom: liver and kidney any time, eyes up to 85 years, skin up to 80 years, lungs up to 79 years, hearts up to 65 years, heart valves up to 60 years and pancreas up to 45 years. Digger is 83 so there is potential in his eyes, liver and kidneys. The proportion of these to lean body mass, and Digger is leaner than a post, is about three per cent. Damn – 97 per cent left to find a taker for. I read all sorts of information about bequeathing your body to the medical schools at Auckland and Otago. I think the medical schools are amazing. I think people who bequeath their bodies or donate organs are too. In the end, I email, then call the Bequest Co-ordinator at one of them – a woman who is pleasant and funny and has heard this all many times before, but is keen to help. In short, it isn’t possible. They have catchments for bequests that are largely dictated by transport times and there is a cap on the number they can accept each year. There are limitations on the types of cadavers that they want, or don’t want, that include various manifestations of disease or illness. ‘Even if he dropped dead on the doorstep of the medical school, there’d be the cost of the funeral director to accept him, and he may not make the acceptance criteria.’ Damn. I can’t even give him away. Donating Digger’s body can’t be done; fact enough to close that door. But, still I’ve got a body to offload at some point and this would have been an easy hand-over. Take him – here take him and I’ll throw in a set of steak knives . . . He’s not wanted, by them or me. No man’s an island, but Digger comes close; he hasn’t anyone else. He’s got a load of mates who will take a beer off him, a few less who will shout him one, and a daughter who wants nothing to do with any part of him or the greater whole I’ll have to cremate. What if he was genuinely just trying to help someone in need of an organ donation? In his compromised way, but help nonetheless. I record it all for Digger, not the steak knives, just the facts of what is possible and how it would work. I send him a letter outlining it all. The next time I see him, I haul the letter out and work it through with him. ‘Yes, love – I can see the issues,’ followed by, ‘Eyes – eh? Liver and kidneys – okay.’ I don’t believe his liver and kidneys are okay, but that’s my mind being too literal. Actually that reflects my suspicion, not the facts. He’s recently had a liver function test and everything is hunky dory. A lifetime of swilling and his organs aren’t going to knock him off – no hepatic fibrosis or cirrhosis here. ‘You got that then, Digger? No chance of bequeathing your body, a slim chance of organ donation?’ ‘Yes, love – seems pretty clear to me.’ A few minutes later – ‘Okay then, if you have to have a burial, how would you like it done?’ ‘Oh I don’t give a bugger; just bury me under the lemon tree.’ A few weeks later, the subject of death comes up again. I ask him about his family’s typical arrangements. ‘Yes, they were buried, but I won’t be. I’m donating my body to science.’ If delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary, I’m just as much in the delusion zone as he is for hoping the information would have gone in.
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