‘My mom was 40 when she started physical therapy school. The year she took anatomy lab she told my sister and me … when she died, she wanted to donate her body to science, too.’ Illustration: Ibrahim Rayintakath/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘My mom was 40 when she started physical therapy school. The year she took anatomy lab she told my sister and me … when she died, she wanted to donate her body to science, too.’ Illustration: Ibrahim Rayintakath/The Guardian Memento mori: a series about death Death and dying My mother donated her body to science. I really wasn’t prepared for what came next The process included a gala featuring medical students doing aerial yoga and singing Taylor Swift to donors’ families. In some ways, it was absolutely perfect
When my mother, Erin O’Connell, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer in late 2022, one of her first thoughts was: “What will I do if I can’t work?”
At the time, she was 62 years old and working as a physical therapist in Portland, Oregon, where she had recently moved to live closer to me and my family. Reluctantly, she filed for short-term disability from her job and paused her training to become a volunteer search and rescue EMT.
My mom was 40 when she started physical therapy school. I was already a teenager. Despite her newfound stress, I remember how deeply it affected me to watch her fall in love with her work. The year she took anatomy lab she told my sister and me – and anyone who would listen – that dissecting a real human body was the coolest thing she had ever gotten to do, and when she died, she wanted to donate her body to science, too.
I spent so much of my childhood wanting nothing more than my mother’s hard-earned approval, and here she was, utterly devoted to a dead body. On some level, I was jealous of that cadaver.
Read more Now here I was, 25 years later, with my mom’s illness progressing, printing out the paperwork from the nearest med school: “Enrollment Form To Bequeath a Body On Behalf of an Individual”. And all I could think was how jealous I would be of the students who would dissect my mother – who would get to do what I never could, crack her open and peek inside.
This paperwork, though, was its own form of clarity. My mom was going to die, too young and against her will, but we had a plan – an easy, free, meaningful one at that.
Of course, the reality ended up being more complicated and more absurd than I imagined.
After her death, my mom’s body was transported to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), just across the river from where we had both lived in Portland.
I worried that, in my grief, I might drive to campus to find out where she was. Would I be tempted to wander the halls, looking for her? Better not to dwell on it, I decided. Instead, I imagined she had been shipped elsewhere, used for something vaguely embarrassing like rectal science or dentistry.
Every year, roughly 25,000 Americans sign up to donate their bodies to science after death. But demand far outstrips supply. According to Tamara Ostervoss, director of OHSU’s body donation program, “it remains an unpopular choice,” partly because so few people even know it’s an option . In Oregon, she told me, only about 1% of people choose to donate their bodies.
For my mom, the registration process was simple: a two-page consent form, signed in front of two witnesses. My mom agreed that her family would not profit from the donation or any discoveries that resulted from it,…