I’m leaving my body to science. To do this, I’ve drawn up a living will. Here it is:
I, Brian Daly, leave my body to science.
xo
Brian
There. Nothing to it.
Wait a minute. Who’s going to show up at the house to pick up my body? The big names in science are dead: Galileo, Copernicus, Mendel, Darwin. Could Bill Nye do it?
But there are so many sciences. Do I have to pick just one? What if I pick the wrong one? I feel sorry for people in the past who left their body to a science that turned out to be not so scientific.
“I’m leaving my body to phrenology.” That would be sad.
And speaking of sad, how about the boxers who got killed in the ring and left their body to the sweet science? There’s nothing sweet about boxing. To anybody thinking of taking up boxing as a science, I say this: No hitting. Use your words.
Could practitioners of the dismal science end up with my dead body? Over my dead body. No economists will get their hands on me until they can explain increases in the sale of durable goods. I don’t get it. If these goods are so durable, why do people have to buy more of them?
Here’s a thought: My body could be cut up into little chunks the size of cocktail wieners and doled out to a number of sciences. That might work. But something tells me one substantial gift donated to one science would do more good than the shotgun approach.
So what should I do?
I’ve got it. I can leave my body to the science department at the high school where I work. Keep it local! There’s an elective science course that covers anatomy and physiology—it’s called Anatomy and Physiology—and I bet the teacher could use me. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I can imagine the day when she unwraps my carcass in her lab on the second floor and introduces me to the kids. “This is Mr. Daly. He used to be an ed tech here at the high school. What say we open him up and look under the hood?”
Hold on. What if I die during the summer? My body will be rotten and useless by the time the school year rolls around.
Maybe I’d better put this living will aside for now. The more I think about it, the more I question my decision to leave my body to science.
But I wonder if I could leave my body to Home Ec.