What Cadavers Taught Me with Mary Roach

Mary Roach is a New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed science writer who once thought science was boring. She has traveled the world and written fascinating, humorous books about the human body and its curiosities. Today she discusses three of them with Sarah: "Stiff," "Six Feet Over," and her latest, "Replaceable You." They also talk about how our culture got so squeamish about dead bodies, and where we might go after we die.

Learn more about Mary Roach and her wonderful books at https://www.maryroach.net/

For more information and to become an organ donor, please visit https://www.organdonor.gov/

Transcript:

Mary Roach: People would write to me and say, reading your book it helped me because it made death just a fact of life. It demystified the things that happen after we die. And just by, you know, looking at it in a straightforward way and accepting it. The matter of factness was strangely comforting for people. So I think that being around bodies means being comfortable a little bit with death

Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh and my guest today is New York Times bestselling author Mary Roach. She has written some fascinating and often hilarious books about the human body, and today we'll discuss three of them: “Stiff,” “Six Feet Over,” and her latest, “Replaceable You.” In her writing, Mary has an uncanny ability to make squeamish topics [00:01:00] feel less so. She investigates the science of the human body in much more detail than most of us think we want to know. In this conversation, we talk about how being with dead bodies may reduce our fear surrounding death. We also discussed some amazing advances in organ donation, as well as how to decide what to do with your own body after you die.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

Mary Roach: Thank you so much.

Sarah Cavanaugh: We share a sort of voracious curiosity and a adventurous spirit. I am looking at three of your books, “Stiff” and “Six Feet Over” and “Replaceable You.” So we'll talk about a little bit of everything, but I love, there's a bit in one of your books about where your feet have been around the world and that really resonated with me. I would love to write something around, where have I been? Where has this body been? So does your curiosity arrive slowly for you or does it hit you like a drug?

Mary Roach: When I start a book, I'm [00:02:00] very much, I'm almost like a location scout for a documentary. Where am I gonna go? What travel opportunities does this present? And I think it's, uh, it's not just because I'm selfishly wanting to travel, but that's part of it. Also I think that readers are curious about the world as well, and it makes it a little more fun for the reader. Because I'm sometimes asking people to digest some complicated science and so I wanna sweeten the pot a little bit, but I guess I'm just a curious person.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, most people would refer to you as a science writer, but I'm hearing you say you're a travel writer.

Mary Roach: There's no living to be made as a pure travel writer these days. So I've found that science was a way to do that. Science is happening all over the world, so it's been my entry ticket.

Sarah Cavanaugh: You said that in your childhood you thought science was boring. When did that change for you?

Mary Roach: I did, I had this ridiculous idea that I wanted to do something creative, right? [00:03:00] So science — science is just a slog, that's just homework and responsibilities and it's complicated. But that's so misguided because science is, it's very creative. Science research in particular — it's trying to figure out solutions. People think, engineering, oh, that's just math, and it's just a slog. But it's the creativity required to design and make a bridge safe or to rethink the space toilets, for example — there's so much curiosity and creativity in those sciences. So when I realized that I guess was when I started writing for Discover Magazine back in the late eighties, I guess it was. And a couple of other magazines that were related to health and medicine, and I just realized how misguided my thinking had been and in a way the human body is its own foreign country. So exploring and learning about that was also fascinating for me.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that. Yeah. The [00:04:00] body's a whole landscape.

Mary Roach: It is with interesting inhabitants.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Yes.

Mary Roach: Some welcome and some not.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So what drew you to the intersection of science, mortality, and the human body and what keeps you coming back?

Mary Roach: Well, what drew me to it was, I, around the time, around like the end of the nineties, magazines were starting to flounder. Budgets were being cut, and I was thinking about books and talking with an agent. And I was wandering around the basement of the UCSF, University of California, San Francisco Medical School, library. Back then, you could just go in and the bottom floor is where they had all these books, old books that nobody really looks at except people like me. And I found, it's like almost a whole shelf, the proceedings of the Stapp Car Crash Conference. I'm like, what's a car crash conference? And it was from the, all this stuff from the sixties [00:05:00] when people were just starting to think about automotive safety, that cars were something that wasn't just going to be designed for looks, but it needed to be designed to be a little bit safer. Because some of the accidents back then were just horrific because there was no awareness of how to make cars safer. And so they were designing crash test dummies and in order to calibrate the dummies, they had to bring in cadavers and put 'em on a crash sled and see what happens at 40 miles an hour, 50 miles. Or what are the injuries, how do we make these dummies smart, in a sense? And I wrote a short column about it, and that column got pretty high hit rates, which was a little bit surprising. And around that time I was speaking with an agent and he said, what seems to be interesting for your, your readers? I'm like, well, they seem to be interested in cadaver stuff. There was a second column that had to do with how much will the human stomach hold before it bursts. And this was a Thanksgiving day column. So I had those two and people seemed to find them interesting. And so my [00:06:00] agent, who's still my agent, said, “you know, you ought to think about a book proposal about this cadaver research.” And I was like, that's a terrible book idea. Nobody's gonna buy that book. Nobody’s gonna read that book. But he was right. I didn't have a specific fascination for the human body or cadavers or death. It was just, things happen in your career. And one book leads to another. There was a chapter in that book about, in the early days of anatomy people didn't know what some of, what all these parts did and so there was a sense of — maybe that's where the soul is? Maybe it's in the liver, maybe it's in this little thing in the brain. Where is the soul? And I liked that juxtaposition of science with something that is within the realm of religion or spirituality. I thought that was fascinating. So that was my second book, “Six Feet Over.” It was originally called “Spook.” I guess I just kept coming back to the human body, this thing that we inhabit, and that scientists poke around in and try to figure out.

Sarah Cavanaugh: When did we get [00:07:00] squeamish about our own bodies and about death?

Mary Roach: I think the mortuary industry in the United States, I can't speak for globally, but in this country — when embalming was discovered as something you could do to preserve a body for a while anyway, not permanently. People saw this when Lincoln was assassinated and his body was, when it basically went on a whistle stop tour and people came out and they saw the body, which had been embalmed. It was, this was one of the first times people even knew that was something that could be done. And so that began to catch on as a business, like we can sell people this idea of everlasting niceness when in fact that's not, it's not the case. That’s not actually the fact. You, you, you know, embalming, if you're doing an open casket, say, you know, that's something that keeps the body preserved for that span of time, but not forever. But we handed over the business of being dead and being a body. We handed that over to a business and so people stopped caring for the body, cleaning the body, laying it out in the parlor. All the things that people used to do — that was handed over to morticians and mortuaries. And I think that started this movement away from feeling comfortable with the remains of a loved one. That's how squeamishness got started, I, I believe. It was removed. It was put behind closed doors. It was something taboo and it didn't used to be, you know, and also I think as medicine has improved and life expectancy has improved, death wasn't an expected thing anymore. So many people lost children, lost loved ones at an early age before there were antibiotics. People just were a little bit more accustomed to loss and thus to death and thus to [00:09:00] all of the things that have to happen after someone dies.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Back to “Stiff,” you write, “the gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy, it is about confronting death.” I wonder if being up close and personal with so many cadavers, as you researched your book and also with your own mother after she died, did that change your feelings about death in any way?

Mary Roach: I don't think it's made me more accepting of death. Like I'm not embracing it in any way that I wasn't before. But something about the experience of seeing a dead body, whether it's at the body farm or in a classroom where people are learning anatomy — you do have this sense of a, the body as a hull. I remember going to the Body Farm in Tennessee, and this is a place where people study the forensics of decay. Like in order to pinpoint the time of death in a murder case, they need to [00:10:00] understand how the different environmental scenarios affect how quickly a body decomposes. So you walk in there and it doesn't look like a research facility. It looks like a little park, right? Until you kinda look around and, okay, there's a guy lying under a tree. In this case he was clothed because they were looking into the effects of clothing on how quickly a body decomposes. And I remember looking at that even from a distance, 30 feet away, thinking that you wouldn't mistake that guy for somebody taking a nap. There's just this almost intuitive sense of like: that person is dead. There's a stillness, and that makes you think — where did they go? They're clearly not home anymore. They're not there. This is a shell. And so many people avoid thinking about it, thinking about what happens to your body after death, and —

Sarah Cavanaugh: Why do you think that discomfort runs so deep, and do you think we need to face it more openly?

Mary Roach: One of the things that was [00:11:00] interesting when Stiff came out. I got letters, emails, people would write to me and say, reading your book it helped me because it made death just a fact of life. It demystified the things that happen after we die. And just by, you know, looking at it in a straightforward way and accepting it. The matter of factness of that book was strangely comforting for people. So I think that being around bodies means being comfortable a little bit with death you know, anything that's behind closed doors seems a little unnerving 'cause it's an unknown.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I would agree. You put language around something that people aren't talking about.

Mary Roach: Yeah. Language and people and settings and just — it's a world that's out there and it's interesting and it's where we're all inevitably going.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Even though we don't want to.

Mary Roach: Even though we don't want to, no.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. We're having too much fun here.

Mary Roach: Yeah, exactly. [00:12:00] Exactly.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So organ donation appears in “Stiff” and in your new book, “Replaceable You,” you spend a fair amount of time on tissue donation, skin, hearts, eyes. When you donate your organs and tissues, they seem to live on after you die. And I have a beloved cousin who had a complete liver transplant. It was a miracle that she had a match 'cause she had a emergency surgery. What did you learn about organ transplantation that surprised you?

Mary Roach: I was present at an organ recovery at UCSF Medical Center. I remember they're wheeling the donor down the hall and into the operating room and this donor has a pulse, is warm to the touch, uh, is dead, but doesn't match up with any experience I've had of dead people. So that was strange, and the other thing about this donor, this woman, just to think about the lives that she could now [00:13:00] affect/save was amazing. And the squeamishness people have about it — I tried to present it as this is, an operating room. It's surgery. And you would allow surgery on a loved one to save their life. This is just surgery, to save somebody else's life. It's not mutilation. You don't have to worry about infection. You don't have to worry about aftercare. You don't have to worry about complications. This is like — it's surgery with no downside. I wish more people would see that and would become donors. I also wish this country had an opt-out policy.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, you talked about opt-in or opt-out and we're an opt-in. Yeah.

Mary Roach: Yeah. Some European countries are opt-out, where you have to take action to not be a donor, rather than here where you have to take action. You have to like, sign up or make an agreement or put a dot on your license in order to be a donor. So, it would be nice if that were something more people [00:14:00] did.

Sarah Cavanaugh: And also I think it circles back to what we were talking about with the squeamishness, how squeamish we are with death. So, you rereleased stiff in 2021 and you wrote a new epilogue. You include a letter to the university body donation program, which I love. I don't know if you're willing to read a bit of it. I don't know if you have it handy, but I would love that if it's around you.

Mary Roach: Okay. Here's the letter that I would put in my file for any medical students that get my hull. “Hello there. Pardon my appearance. I have a pretty good sense of how I must look because I spent some time around cadavers for a book I wrote. I thought I'd share a little background about the pale form with which you'll soon be intimately acquainted. At 61, as I write this, all my organs seem to be working fine. Who knows which ones will one day betray me. That's for you to discover. My feet served me well and [00:15:00] without complaint, I rarely wore heels and hope no one feels they have to anymore. They wandered around on tundra moss and lava beds on the hard snow of an Antarctic ice field, the command deck of a ballistic missile submarine, the worn linoleum of obscure and far-flung research labs. I logged millions of miles with this body. And I hope you do the same with yours. The world is astonishing.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that.

Mary Roach: Yeah. I forgot about that. I forgot about that letter.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Did all of your research change or inform what you've decided to do, with your body?

Mary Roach: You know what? I, I still think about it. After reading that, I, I'm, I'm ashamed to admit I haven't signed the paperwork anywhere. I'm still, like, I do like the idea of there being some ritual, like scattering remains. Like my husband, I was telling my husband the specifics of what I — it's not like a specific place. It doesn't matter what it is, [00:16:00] but he, he keeps getting it wrong. I'm like, do I have to write this down for you? But the idea of picturing somebody doing that final gesture with your remains is still appealing to me. I know that I don't want to be buried, I don't want to be embalmed. But I haven't yet pulled the trigger on whole body donation. It's silly 'cause I think it's important and I think it's a good thing to do. And then I think about, okay, composting — that's a nice, that, that there's new options that are coming into popularity. And I think, well, that's a lovely thing too, I don't, it's silly. You know, you're gone. What do you care? Do something useful. What's my problem? Why don't I, why don't I do that?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you know what that thing is? That hesitation? Have you thought about that? Like, I think it's everywhere. I think everyone is —

Mary Roach: I think it's because I see, I've seen enough cadavers. It's like, who wants to be naked looking like that? That's so stupid. Just because I can picture the [00:17:00] scene, you know? I know, I know what research bodies look like and you're old, you've probably been sick, and here are all these, you know, youthful medical students standing around. Like it's not the cutting me up that bothers me. It's the looking at me going, “Oh God.” Is that so vain and stupid?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I love what you said about don't post any pictures of me on the internet, or I’ll find you.

Mary Roach: Yeah. I will find you and haunt you.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yes. I am, at this point, I'm leaning into composting, but I actually want to talk to my kids first because I think it matters for those left behind. I've been a long time environmental advocate, so I am very conscious about, no embalming. I'm hesitating around cremation, but aquamation is interesting and composting is interesting, but I also want to get the blessing of my whole family. I don't want them to feel [00:18:00] like they have to do something that I requested, if that makes sense and they didn't wanna do it because it horrifies them.

[00:18:06] Mary Roach: That happened with my father, and he did not want any kind of memorial, any kind of funeral. He just wanted — just burn me up and don't, not even a box. It was just, just cremate me. And, and because my mother was Catholic, the Catholic church at that time was not allowing that. She had the urn in the closet, I think it was. But she finally, she couldn't stand it and she finally buried him, bought a plot and buried the urn. He said, I don't want any kind of funeral. I don't want anything to do with organized church. But a lot of people knew him, and, and it was a small town that we grew up in. And people said, when is the memorial? Oh, we're not doing a memorial. What do you mean we're not doing a memorial for Wally Roach? And so his wishes made her very uncomfortable. And yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's important to talk about what you want with, uh, [00:19:00] your family and to do something that they're gonna be comfortable with.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Okay, I want to talk for a minute about amputations. Quick backstory: my mother-in-law is a double amputee. She has been for 11 years. She's now 89 years old and lives independently, she's quite amazing. One leg is above the knee, one leg is below the knee, so she really can only wear one prosthetic, but I was really fascinated in chapter seven of “Replaceable You,” and curious what you learned about amputations and prosthetics.

Mary Roach: First of all, was she diabetic? Is that what happened?

Sarah Cavanaugh: No, she had vascular disease, so her veins were very tiny and eventually didn't get enough blood flow to her legs. But she went through many surgeries that were quite gruesome to try and graft veins from other parts of her body down to her feet. But none of them were successful.

Mary Roach: Right. I'm sorry to hear that. That sounds like a horrible struggle. The woman who got me rolling on [00:20:00] this whole book, she's an amputee, but an elective amputee. She's somebody who had to try very hard to find someone to amputate her foot. She had been born with spina bifida, there were nerve issues that caused the foot to grow in twisted. And again, like what you were describing, many operations that didn't really help or didn't fix the problem over a span of years. And she tried to find a surgeon to amputate. She would see people with a below the knee prosthetic hiking, running, doing all these things that were very hard and uncomfortable for her. And she couldn't find a surgeon. She said, they'd say to me, this is a healthy foot. And she'd say, yeah, but I can't walk on it. And that I found fascinating. And from the surgeon's perspective, you understand, because amputation is a, there's a finality to it. There's no going back. You're not putting that foot back on. And also, you know, liability. What if the patient develops phantom limb pain, and blames me, the [00:21:00] surgeon? It's also insurance related. You have to justify — why are you performing this operation? Why don't you just do another surgery? So There's a kind of bias for wholeness, even when the wholeness itself is the disability. Also, it was interesting — I talked to Brit Young, who's a writer. She's, I think it's above the elbow amputee, and she writes about how some of those, bionic limbs, those myoelectric limbs. They get a lot of media hype and they look really cool. But she said, because they're heavy, because they're exhausting mentally to go through and kind of toggle, through the menu of grips, 'cause the hand is, it's not a leg, it's five fingers moving independently. And to get that to work in a way that matches what you had with a natural hand is really a challenge. You know, they're heavy, they're battery powered, they're expensive. And she said, again, she said, I am more disabled with that arm than without it. I [00:22:00] found that really fascinating.

Sarah Cavanaugh: When I interviewed Dr. Kelner about his book, “Awe,” he's a Berkeley professor, he defines awe as the feeling or being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Though I imagine there's many times in your life you've been in those situations, is there a part of the human body that still inspires awe in you?

Mary Roach: Oh, all of it. When I worked on this most recent book, “Replaceable You,” I just was over and over again astounded with what your body is doing, behind the scenes with no conscious recognition at all. I mean, just like I remember thinking — okay, because it is so challenging to replace bits and pieces of the body, I thought, is there any one component of the body that we can replace? And replace it in a way that it's just as good as what you started out with? Not like, can we give you something that will fix a damaged organ, but can we match what nature starts out with? And I thought, okay, what about [00:23:00] tears, artificial tears? So I got on a Zoom call with this guy who spent his whole life studying the tear film, which is not the tears that you cry, but the tear layer that protects the eye. And it was an hour and a half that we were on the phone talking about the tear film. And there's this amazing structure, the glycocalyx, and it's like a brush, like a scaffold, and it holds the various layers intact so nothing mixes. So you have the protective layer and then you have these other layers. And then there's mucins, which are clearing foreign material and creating that, like sleep snot in the corner of your eye. Anyway, the answer was no, we cannot recreate that. Not even close. He said, well, some of those artificial tears, you know, though, you'll feel better for a couple of hours, but in a sense you're washing away the good stuff. So, just over and over I was gobsmacked by the complexities that are there and even the simplest, seemingly simplest parts of the human [00:24:00] form. The eye, the ability of the eye, the ciliary muscle, just the auto focus that exists with no effort at all. I can look at you on my laptop screen and then look across the street and read a sign. And that's all happening without my conscious control. And that's amazing. So rather than being amazed at like, whoa, look at this new bionic limb that they made, what I took away from that book was — the awe belongs with the human body. It is impressive what folks are doing and what science has created in terms of trying to replace things. But when you think about it, medicine is a couple of hundred years competing with billions of years of evolution. So that's a pretty steep challenge. So every time I discover something new — I remember for “Gulp,” learning about stretch receptors. This automatic process where, you know, if a, if the rectum expands too much and it's in [00:25:00] peril of bursting, your body goes, okay, we need to ditch some of that. We need to let you know: first of all, you know, you've gotta go take a dump or you've gotta fart. So this is something as simple as a fart. It's like, well, that's actually really important and it's incredible the way your body is designed to sense these things.

Sarah Cavanaugh: It's a, as you put it, a miraculous machine, this body.

Mary Roach: Yeah, it is. It really is.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So the dedication in “Six Feet Over” read “For my parents, wherever they are or aren't.” Where do you think people go after they die, if they go anywhere?

Mary Roach: I think that people go where they were before they were born, and I don't know where that is or what that is, but I feel like we've all been there for a very long time and that's probably where we're going, wherever that is.

Sarah Cavanaugh: In this book in particular, you tackle topics that normally exist in the abstract and religious and spiritual context. How are people applying the scientific method [00:26:00] to things like reincarnation, the soul, the afterlife, and near death experiences?

Mary Roach: Well, I wrote the book in 2004, so I don't know what, how things have changed. I tried to focus on academic based work and there's not a lot of it. At the time there were two universities here, University of Arizona had someone who worked with mediums, and University of Virginia has a large endowment specifically for the persistence of personality after death. And I don't know if they still do it, but they were doing reincarnation work, near-death experiences, where those were the two main avenues that they were looking at — persistence of the spirit or the personality after death.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk about mediums. Please explain what a medium is and why at various points throughout history, people have been apt to believe in their abilities.

Mary Roach: Sure. Well, a medium is somebody who is a middleman between the living and the dead. So it's somebody who professes to have an ability to [00:27:00] communicate with the beyond. People often pay them money to send a message or receive a message from a departed loved one. So mediums and seances, which was a setting in which that happens, tthere was an era in the early part of the 1900s where that really took on a level of scientific respectability because — oh, it had to do with ectoplasm mediums who would produce this material that they claimed it was tangible proof of spirits. And they were doing it in a way that no one could figure out until magicians like Houdini came in and said, I can tell you what they're doing. These people are just good at tricks. The people who would go to these seances, some of them were, very well-respected scientists. So ectoplasm was covered in Scientific American. It was something that was written about by respected academics at the time. And the other thing going on was, the telegraph, the telephone, the ability to send a voice through [00:28:00] the ether. This was new. And so it seemed, I think to people like, well, if that could happen, which seems improbable and weird, why is it such a stretch to imagine communicating with the, the other world? I mean, Thomas Edison, his last project before he died was a spirit communicator. He had this sense of like, maybe we just need to amplify their little voices, like the who's down in Whoville.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I'd love to talk about humor 'cause humor runs through your work, even when you're writing about corpses, the supernatural. And you're known for mixing humor with heavy subjects. So how do you see humor as a tool for engaging with subjects that scare us or unsettle us?

Mary Roach: I think it is just that, I think it's a way of diffusing the awkwardness. I think it's a way of taking the reader by the hand and saying, you know, this is kind of weird for me too. Let's just dive in together. There's always a place for humor. It just depends on the kind of humor. It's simply just an acknowledgement of the [00:29:00] surrealness of things or the juxtaposition of things that you don't expect. It just makes it less ponderous and a little more every day. So I think that helps people feel comfortable with some of these topics, but it's not a strategy that I intentionally employ. It's just the way I see the world and the things that appeal to me. And it's fun to write that way. And, it seems to have worked

Sarah Cavanaugh: It's so engaging.

Mary Roach: Well, thank you.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. A friend of mine is a documentary filmmaker and she makes climate films, but she calls them toxic comedies because you can't just parade a bunch of cancer patients in front of the audience and expect them to be moved. Laughter opens the heart, and we can really take in what you're telling us. And, uh, I believe that.

Mary Roach: Yes I do too. I remember The Daily Show, you, sometimes Jon Stewart would have Bill O'Reilly on or somebody like that. But they would end up at some point laughing together. And for some reason I found that [00:30:00] so comforting, just two human beings sitting together, sharing a laugh, felt hopeful in some weird way.

Sarah Cavanaugh: You must come up with a lot of ideas for scientific research studies. Have you ever pitched any, to any of the universities?

Mary Roach: No. I, I, I, I don't think I have come up with any ideas. No. No.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Is there anything you would research if you could?

Mary Roach: Oh, if I were a researcher?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, if you were the scientist.

Mary Roach: If I were a scientist. No. I'm so happy being the person visiting all these labs and spending a couple of days. I have a really short attention span and I think I would be frustrated by academia and journals and funding. There's, there's so many elements that I see people struggle with in academia, doing research and now the cuts that have happened.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you think our scientific community has any blind spots when it comes to death?

Mary Roach: I think, [00:31:00] there's still an emphasis among medical practitioners on treatment and cure and an ability to accept that there's a moment where it's appropriate to float the option of not doing something. That's changing and there is a little more of that being done, but I still feel that that option should be presented like, this is something you can do, but it's gonna be a rough road. And you may decide that's not how you want to spend your last months. Seems like a blind spot in the culture of medicine.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So after writing these books, you have literally looked at many dead bodies. Has your relationship to grief changed in any way? Or do you feel like you can compartmentalize that that's your work.

Mary Roach: I think because the bodies that I see, with the exception of my mother, the bodies that I've seen have been in the context of science, and so they look like people, but they're not people. and it's easy to see them as not people. So every [00:32:00] now and then, I've had a glimpse of who, of who that person was. And then it becomes sad. Like, I remember seeing a card, it was at the College of Mortuary Science in San Francisco. And the card of who this person was that they were practicing on. And I could see, like the loved one's name, their occupation, what their name was. And it was sad. There's this life, it's a life there on the slab. It's not just a body, it's a life. you asked me about grief and I haven't, since writing these books, I haven't lost any one. So I don't, I don't know that it would be easier. I think it'd still be really, really hard to lose, to lose someone you love. I don't know that what I do would affect that.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Seeing your mom was very different than seeing other bodies that you did not know.

Mary Roach: Yeah. Sure. My brother and I went in and we didn't know what was really going on. They just sort of ushered us to this big room and said, okay, well, we'll be back in an hour, or you have an hour. And we were like, where are we? And then we looked around [00:33:00] and it's a big room. It's the room where they do the services, I think the memorials. And then the, uh, we looked across the room, it was like, oh, there's mom. And we had an hour in there and we're like, I don't really know quite, what do we do? So my mother always loved to do the jumble, so we went out to the car and got the valley news and we did the jumble with her one last time, which seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I had mixed feelings about, you know, that whole thing of embalming and creating the image, they have a name for it in mortuary science, the lasting image. They want it to be pretty. And it's true, that is an image that sticks with you, but I don't want that image. We didn't do an open casket service, but they had her presented and laid out. It's almost like, look, we did this work. We want you to admire what we did. It's like, no, I don't want that image in my mind when I think of my mom. 'cause that's not who [00:34:00] she was to me. That wasn't her.

Sarah Cavanaugh: They create a memory picture.

Mary Roach: Mm. That's the term. Yes. A memory picture. And I, I do have that memory picture and I don't want it. and you can't throw it away. It's, it's in your memory. Maybe, I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems like, I'd rather have an image from when she was healthy and well, and

Sarah Cavanaugh: My mother and I went on a walk, she was still in the early stages of her cancer, and we went on a walk together and I took a picture of her in the woods. And that's the one I try and hold onto.

Mary Roach: Yeah.

Sarah Cavanaugh: she still had her hair and it was just the two of us.

Mary Roach: Yes. That's so much better. We have a neighbor who lost a child in a terrible way and the whole family was grieving. And what the dad, he started going to a medium and he so wanted to believe that the medium was in touch with his son. His son was eight or nine when he died. And the medium got the age wrong. But our friend would [00:35:00] say, oh, she sensed that he was older than his years. He was more mature. And I was like, ah, no, she just was wrong. But what happened, I thought was interesting was that his daughter at one point, who was in her teens, said, stop it, because these things that this medium is saying are replacing the memories that I have of him. The real memories of him. These aren't real and I don't want them.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm fascinated by that. Like what do we remember and do we remember what is real.

Mary Roach: I remember seeing a study saying that, a false memory, something that you have completely wrong in your head is as real as the real thing. Like you can't tell, you would think that if it's a memory that's wrong, it would be a little fuzzier. There'd be clues that it might be wrong, but it is as vivid and as convincing as the actual truth of what happened. It's so hard for people to tell the difference.

Sarah Cavanaugh: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

Mary Roach: Peaceful [00:36:00] exit — being surrounded by someone, at least one person who loved you and valued you. I think knowing that they're there, even if you're mostly checked out, just having that person there, I think would be comforting and calming. I remember when my father-in-law was in hospice. We were all there and 10 o'clock at night, we went back to the house, but his wife stayed there with him. And he was mostly out of it, you know, the final stages of dying, you're not there in the present in the room. But at one point he woke up and she was there and she said, Billy, what do you need? And he just pointed at her. Doesn't that kill you? Oh my God. [00:37:00] Do you try to make all your guests cry?

Sarah Cavanaugh: What is your mother-in-law's name?

Mary Roach: Jeanne.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Jeanne. Yeah. He just pointed at her. Oh my God. And then, you know, that was the last interaction that they had. He died the next day, but he came, you know, he kind of rallied and woke up at one point. They were together 60 years.

Mary Roach: That's a peaceful exit right there.