Episode 2: "What Happens to Human Remains in the U.S.?"

Whenever people ask me what I do, and I tell them that I research, teach, and write about the law of human remains, their first response is to say “uuuh.”  And their second is to say “I’ve always wondered…”  America is a uniquely death denying culture, which is perhaps why we know so little about what follows death.  Not in the spiritual sense…but in the physical sense.  What happens to human remains after death in the United States? Death is sometimes tragic, sometimes a blessing — always inevitable. Death transforms a living human being, a person with rights and autonomy, into … something else. Tissue and bone, once animated by life, converted into an object of fear, a focus for grief, and a medical and scientific resource. A human cadaver is no longer a person, but neither is it an object to be easily discarded. Human remains occupy an uneasy position in U.S. law, and their existence raises three fundamental questions. The first question compels our behavior and requires us to act: what, if anything, must be done with human remains? The second question circumscribes our behavior and discourages action: what cannot be done with human remains? The third question seeks to set normative expectations for our behavior: what should be done with human remains? These are questions that we will address in this podcast, not only in terms of what the law IS, but in terms of what we think the law OUGHT to be.  This means that we have to think about a lot of things that most of us don’t really want to think about.  But I promise it gets easier.  Confronting the reality of human remains and the social norms and laws surrounding them is both a unromantic practical exercise and a deeply spiritual one.  I promise that it’ll be worth it. I want to start out the podcast the same way I start each new semester of my funeral and cemetery law class at Wake Forest — by talking about a series of real life cases that which I think raise some of the fundamental issues that we’ll be tackling throughout the podcast.  And I thought it would be more interesting if my 17 year old son Liam Sherman helped me out by giving his initial impressions of each case. For further show notes or to submit questions or comments, please visit the website www.deathetseq.com.

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