The Body Farm

This post was inspired by Episode 68 of the podcast Criminal titled All the Time in the World. Here is the description of the episode from iTunes:

“The “body farm” at Texas State University is a place almost no one except researchers and law enforcement are able to see, because it's one of the very few places in the world that deliberately puts out human bodies to decompose in nature. Forensic Anthropologists observe decomposition in order to help law enforcement determine when and how someone may have died. We asked if we could visit, and they agreed.”

I had heard of “The Body Farm” before, but I thought there was only one and it was in Quantico, Virginia. Well, there are actually six, and while there is one in Virginia, the Texas State University body farm is the biggest one, at 26 acres!

Apparently, there are three ways a body farm can acquire a body. A medical examiner can donate an unclaimed body, a family can donate a loved one's body, or a person can fill out the proper paperwork before they die to ensure that their body gets donated.

You can tell where this is going, right?

Now listen, obviously if I die and my organs are healthy enough that they can be donated, I want to do that. They can take everything... organs, corneas, ligaments, bones... Someone may as well be helped by my body when I am dead, right?

But hopefully I will die an old lady, so old that no one wants my old, decrepit organs! Then what? Well, the body farm sounds like an interesting choice! I always envisioned being cremated and someone would cherish my cremains. But really, who is going to cherish my cremains? Paul and I aren't having children...

Maybe just decomposing into the earth is the most natural way? And if Forensic Anthropologists could learn something from it, that would be pretty cool, right?

Of course I wanted to learn more about what you can do with your body after you die. So I found this article on CNN called 10 Uses For Your Body After You Die. These are the ten listed:

1. Donate your organs.
2. Donate your tissue.
3. Will your body to a university for medical students to use.
4. Help doctors practice their skills. (There is a place in Tennessee that actually pays for your body to be transported as well as for it to be cremated and given back to your family when they are done using it.)
5. Leave your body to a body farm. (Family does not get your remains back with this route. I guess it would just be bones by the time you decompose anyway.)
6. Become a crash test cadaver.
7. Give your body to a broker. (This means someone else will be in charge of donating your body to scientific research and you normally don't get a say in where you go or what kind of research is done for you. However, they do pay for your transport to the facility, cremation, and return your cremains to your family when they're done.)
8. Send your body on tour. (Ever hear of the Body Worlds exhibit!?)
9. Become a skeleton for scientific research.
10. Become a skeleton on display at a museum.

These are such fascinating choices! I still think my first choice is to donate all organs and tissues to anyone who can use them, and then be cremated and given to my family.

But if I'm an old lady when I die and my organs aren't good for anything, then I say ship me to the body farm where I can just decompose and go into the earth. And also researchers can use my body to help SOLVE CRIME!!!!

Do you have big plans for your body after you die? 

Have you even though about it? What's your plan? 

Does anything on this list sound like something you would do? 

Is there anything on this list that you wouldn't do?