Sheridan Nygaard
speaker
181 appearances
13 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2023
last heard Apr 2025
Sheridan Nygaard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I'm really grateful for where we have been and I'm excited to see where we go from here.
Yeah, I unfortunately have quite a bit of experience with death and dying in my life. Like Barry, I also professionally am surrounded by it a lot. I worked in research with much older people. They call them the oldest old in literal research. So they're much older than even just like senior citizens. They're 80s, 90s, 100.
And I'm constantly losing participants or talking to participants that are in hospice or losing a loved one. So I'm really surrounded by it a lot in my in my daily life. And then in my personal life, I certainly have been through quite a few losses. I've talked about them on the podcast before, especially in the organ donation episode. So do refer back to that episode if that's interesting to you.
And I would also like to note that organ donation and the conversation that we're having today are going to be very different, but they are obviously linked in a way. And we do have other episodes about death and dying. So check those out if you're interested in this topic. But my personal experience has been different with every death.
So I think it's just interesting as you grow as a person and as you have more life experiences, your experience with death and dying changes a lot, too. And a lot of the death that I... I lost my grandma over COVID, so I was not able to say goodbye. I was not able to see her. It was really, really challenging. We'll definitely talk about COVID later.
I did the research for today's episode, so I know that that's in there. I also know that I learned so much from the research. I didn't go into a lot of detail about... the differences between cultures. And I think that we can talk about that with our own personal experiences here. But I'm just really excited to talk more about it.
The research was really interesting and looking forward to the conversation.
For me, I am not religious. I would call myself more spiritual, but I don't really know what that means. I'm currently in the process of trying to kind of explore that for myself.
um my family is not very religious we are not super in touch with our cultural roots um so every funeral has been different for me um just based on preference and i think that's kind of an interesting thing about america is you can really find any kind of funeral or memorial service or celebration of life service today you can
You can really I mean, I've gone to a tree planting ceremony where somebody had their ashes made into like a tree and we planted that and everybody threw dirt onto the tree. And it was really lovely. But I've never seen anything like that before. I've also done the traditional funerals just in like a funeral home with open caskets and whatnot.
So I think it's one thing I have found beautiful is the. the breadth of different ways that you can decide to celebrate your life at the end. I think something that's really interesting about this is we plan funerals and we never get to attend our own funeral and we never get to hear the beautiful things that all of our loved ones say about us. So I think I had this thought when I was 15.
I said, I think if I know that I would be dying, I think I would have my funeral with me still there. I think I would force everybody to come with me still there. And I would like to hear all of those things for myself. And if they would still like to do something after I've passed, sure. But I mean, it's a little different. I'm not sure how many people would be interested in going. But
Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually probably we could do a whole episode, I think, on medical body donation. I would like to I would like to prep and if people are interested, we would I would absolutely be willing to do that. But I would like to preface that the organ donation is very different than medical body donation. Absolutely. Yep.
Organ donation has to you have to consent to this while you're still alive. You would say so on your driver's license or an advanced directive. And you would just be donating organs in certain situations. And it can also include your skin and eyes and all of these other useful components to living people.
Now, when you die and if for some reason you have not indicated exactly how you would want to be buried or cremated, and your family is kind of at a loss, and a lot of times families cannot afford the costs associated with a funeral service, that's where these medical body donation situations come into play. And so there are several different types of organizations that do this.
You can donate directly to universities. So the University of Minnesota is one of them where I work and am a grad student. And you can donate your body directly to the University of Minnesota. This is going to be one of the more regulated ways to donate your body to science. Otherwise, there are these other organizations, and they come in several different names.
There is a legal commercial market that exists for the purchase and sale of cadavers and even dismembered parts. So the loved ones of the descendants of the decedents they make no profit on the remains of these, of their loved ones. So they, basically are selling their loved ones remains to a body broker who collects cadavers generally for free.
And the body brokers stand to make somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000, typically around 5,800 for selling a whole cadaver. So picture this, your loved one has just passed. You can't afford a funeral. Somebody approaches you for a free way to have them cremated and you and also use some of their body for science. There is a contract that you sign. The contract is highly legal.
It has a lot of jargon. It's very confusing. You sign it because you don't have a lot of other options. And then you find out later that your loved one's body was not used for actual medical research. It was used for research literally anywhere. The bodies could be sold to the military. It could be used...
by like research companies that are trying to understand like knee implants and how they would fit into bodies and things like this. So you really have no idea where your loved one is going after you have signed this contract. You're typically told that it will be used for research and education, but there's really little oversight and people that have done
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