Should I stop selling bodies?

Either you have a soul or you don’t. It’s the same to me either way. 

If there is no soul, then a human corpse is no more sacred than ground beef in the grocery store or the roadkill smushed into the asphalt. If you do have a soul, then it is already gone by the time you close your eyes for the last time. Either way the body you left behind no longer belongs to you. 

Now some might protest and say that a person is the owner of their own body, so once they die their body is inherited by their family along with the rest of their possessions. If this were true then anyone would be free to take that body home with them. Maybe they’d prop it up in an armchair or keep it in the freezer until the weather is nice enough to bring along on the next family fishing trip. If anyone tried to do this, however, their family gathering would doubtlessly be interrupted by the police who would be quick to convince you that the body is not your property to do what you like with. That in reality your body belongs to the state and that it’s up to them to decide your ultimate fate. In other words no, I don’t feel bad about stealing bodies from the state who has no right to them in the first place. 

I work in a mortuary, but I’m not going to tell you which because that would be bad for business. The first body I took was destined for a closed casket funeral. She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt during a car accident, and the force of impact from her face hitting the windshield caused her skull to completely flatten like someone had taken a hammer to play-dough. I commented on the incident at the time to a friend, a male nurse who worked at a nearby teaching hospital. He offered me $500 on the spot so he and his friends could have some extra autopsy practice, and I couldn’t think of any justification to say no. 

The reasoning was straightforward enough. He and his friends would benefit from the extra experience. That experience would then benefit other people during their medical careers. And of course I would benefit from the extra cash. Meanwhile the corpse certainly wasn’t going to mind, and the family was never going to find out, so a strictly utilitarian philosophy dictated that this was the right thing to do. 

The woman weighed 126 pounds at the time of her death, exactly the same as the 28 bricks which I lined the bottom of her casket with. The funeral went as all funerals do, with tears and speeches and many furtive glances at the clock hanging at the back of the church. It wouldn’t have even been worth mentioning if the woman’s father hadn’t made the selfish request to see his daughter one last time. 

I possess a good deal of confidence in my ability to be persuasive, added by the air of authority I’ve cultivated in being a medical professional. Somehow I doubted that I could conjure any medical terminology of sufficient verbosity to convince the man that the accident had condensed his daughter into a pile of bricks though. Instead I was forced to rush from one member of the family to the next, convincing each in turn that seeing the corpse would instill a traumatic memory in them that would forever taint their recollection of the deceased. Once I had sufficient support for this idea we all descended upon the father in a flurry of pleading for him to forgo the request. It was a weight off my heart when he finally acceded and withdrew his intention. 

As you can imagine I learned my lesson after that. I would never again let myself be put in that untenable position. From then on I would only sell the corpses of those destined for cremation instead. 

It’s not like I had much choice in the matter anyway. It turns out that ‘Wagner’, one of my friend’s colleagues who participated in the unsanctioned autopsy wasn’t satisfied with a single body. Not only would Wagner require a steady stream of them, but he even threatened to report me to the authorities if I did not provide. If I were the only one who paid the price I might have fought back, but then Wagner went on to say he would tell the family of the deceased. I couldn’t bear the thought of how they would react, particularly the father who had only wanted to see his daughter again. 

One body a month, that’s what he wanted to purchase, an insignificant number compared with the volume of business my mortuary processed. It wasn’t difficult at all to move the covered bodies into the back of his van, nor was it hard to disguise the incinerated remains. Everything looks pretty much the same after its been blasted with 1800 degrees in the cremation oven for a few hours. Perhaps simply working with corpses all day has desensitized me somewhat, but it didn’t take long before these monthly transactions had become a regular part of my business. It’s not like I was only in it for the money either — I’ve actually been donating all the money I get to help the families with their funeral costs. 

One time I was already waiting for him by the back door with the body ready to go. He took one peek under the cloth, turned up his nose and said, “I don’t like that one. What else do you got?”  

“What’s not to like?” I asked. I grasped hold of the deceased man’s fat belly and shook it with both hands. “He’s jammed full of lovely organs to play with.” 

“We’re studying the removal of ovary cysts,” Wagner told me. “I only want females from now on. The younger the better.” 

It just so happened that I had a girl in her mid twenties scheduled to be cremated and I saw no difference in making the switch. This continued for another four months before I had the chance to catch up with my friend again over coffee, and he was shocked to hear that Wagner still wanted bodies at all. 

“Didn’t Wagner tell you that he dropped out of medical school last semester?” my friend asked me.  

“No. He didn’t mentioned that.” 

“What’s he using the bodies for then?” he asked. And as we stared at each other over our coffees the unsettling possibilities began to float up from those dark places in the mind that we try to forget are there at all. 

“Well it could be worse,” my friend said after a long pause. Then another as he took a sip of coffee. “At least he isn’t hurting anyone.” 

“You don’t think he’s…” 

“Wagner’s always been a weird dude. What’s wrong with it though?” my friend asked, nonplussed. “It’s not like doing it with a kid or an animal or anything. It’s not like anyone is suffering.” 

“We have to tell someone, don’t we?” I asked, not sure what I was hoping to hear. 

My friend shrugged. “Telling someone would hurt people. Not telling would not. Besides, I heard Wagner used to have a girlfriend but it ended badly. She got roughed up and the police had to get involved. To this day he swears she’s the one who started it and he was only defending himself, but she was like a foot shorter than him and half his weight so none of us really believed it. So you’re really doing the community a service by keeping him away from living girls.” 

“But why would he need a new one every month?” I asked.

“What do you care? It’s not like the other girls are going to get jealous. Anyway he’s had enough medical training to know how to preserve them properly, so it’s not like it’s going to be a health issue.” 

Shortly later my friend got a call and had to go back to work. I kept sitting there for about an hour, not drinking my coffee, just thinking while trying not to visualize anything too clearly. I know it’s wrong, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why. 

Of course my instincts revolt at the idea, but does being offended make it wrong? After all, humans have a long history of being offended by everything from scientific knowledge, to using birth control, or even eating the wrong kind of meat on the wrong kind of day, and none of those hurt anyone either. And even if the offensive thought itself is the sin, then the only way the families would suffer is if I stopped providing the bodies and Wagner followed through on his threat to tell them. Not to mention that I wouldn’t be able to donate to the funeral expenses anymore.  

That’s why I’m posting — to ask for your opinion. Should I cut Wagner off or let him have his fun?