Memory Taxidermy
My esteem colleague Normal Angular Momentum, who blogs as Tazgranny on Random Thoughts [Link] has been posting an insightful and evocative series of blots on the subject of organ transplantation, in particular the decision to make organs available upon discorporation.
My personal outlook is that this is a matter of individual conscience and altruism. Clearly there is no value to our bodies to us once we discorporate. So aside from some primeval fear of pseudo-death becoming death, epitomized in the Victorian practice of bells on caskets and the extravagances of cop-lawyer drama on the video, I tend to subscribe to the view advanced by the Star Trek Klingons that the remains are so much inanimate organics.
Under the laws of our Yankee governing organization this does not apply to minors who are generally not permitted to exercise individual choice, often with good reason. Indeed, the practice rather makes one wonder if some sort of adulthood examination is not warranted? But in reading my colleagues moving account of an argument between parents on this matter I perceive a root of the situation.
Simply put, how and what we remember and thus detest or treasure of others is often the result of their actions within our sight and hence that memory is irrevocably wedded to the image of that person and hence to his or her corpus. This suggests that our aversion to offering up discorporate bodies for organ mining has to do with some fear of the destruction of memory, either of ourselves, or as with these young parents, of our own memories of our loved ones.
