It's kind of a love note, though not in the necrophilia way. Maybe a little, but more the intimacy of knowing this woman through anatomical dissection. She had been a doctor herself and left her body to science. It was macabre, and funny and lovely and weird.

We had pretty much that conversation at a memorable Christmas dinner one year when my friend Kristen was in med school.

My SIL says she'd do it, too. And then makes bawdy comments.

I kidna am charmed by his idea. Imagine a bunch of skeleton chairs of a family instead of headstones. It amuses me. We are definitely related.

I am going to be a cadaver in a medical school. My mother wanted to buy me a plot so I could be buried next to her and my father in a cemetery designed to be easily mowed. I declined.

Both of my parents donated their bodies to the U of Iowa medical school. After the school was done with them they were cremated. Right now my dad is in my brother's office and my mother is on top of my sister's bookcase.

I want to send them into space but I can't convince my siblings.

My dad wants his ashes scattered in Yosemite. Grandpa's scattered at his ranch. Grandma was cremated and is I guess at my uncle's house. Great-grandma, likewise. Other grandfather is buried down in Colma, and Babushka is up in Santa Rosa in a site of her second husband's choosing because he's kind of an ass. Well, more than kind of, but not because of that particularly. We don't have a lot of tradition to fall back on, is my point, I guess.

I am donating to med school. The idea that I get to help science even after I'm dead--AWESOME.

My dad's brain is going to Science.

It seems weird, but I kind of like the crash test dummy idea.

My high school English teacher had a daughter in med school. She told us her daughter brought back all kinds of stories of first year pranks in anatomy classes--like sewing up a hard boiled egg in someone else's cadaver's scrotum and giving out prizes for the most interesting tattoos.

I'd like to donate my body to a med school or body farm.

When I was a babybat wannabe, I used to take rubbings of the coolest, oldest tombstones I could find and write stories about the people who were buried there.

If you're cremated, you can fit many more people in the family plot, as it turns out...

My cousin, when she bought her family plot (mixed burial and cremation... repositories?) added a couple of extra cremation spaces just in case any of her cousins (she only has five of us altogether, I think), you know, needed a place. Really, kind of touching.