Ben has a deeded body. He signed it over to the University of Iowa the way his mother signed hers over before she died ten years ago. He will be an anatomical gift, his parts used for teaching and research. I assume this includes his organs, teeth, bones, muscle, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and lymph.

When he dies, his body will be examined to make sure it’s usable. If not, the family will have to bury him, which they can’t afford to do. If his body is viable, it will be transported to the university, where it will be studied for eighteen months. Whatever’s left will then be cremated and interred in the cemetery the university uses, the same one where his mother’s cremains were interred.

His mother was almost rejected from the program after her death because her edema and her tumors—which had made her skin as thick, lumpy, and heavy as cottage cheese in addition to invading her other organs—pushed her above the weight limit between the time she was accepted into the program and her death two weeks later. The university made an exception and took her body anyway. They’d used her in a case study and given her false hope about the potential for genetic therapy to halt her cancer’s progress. I guess they felt an obligation to her and the family after her death.

Jon and I arrived just after two transporters came to the family home to take Jon’s mother’s body to the university. We’d missed her death by a couple of hours. We stood vigil as the transporters maneuvered the gurney from the home to the hearse. They inadvertently rammed her right foot into the screen door as they navigated the doorway. One of them said, Oh, I hit her foot! I guess it doesn’t matter now. They both laughed until they saw us standing there.

It was dark. Everyone was tired, including the transporters, who had to drive all the way to Clinton from Iowa City and back again that night. The rest of the family was out behind the house staying as far away from what was happening as possible. They stood in a big circle smoking, drinking, and telling stories in their small-town Iowa accents with sentences that invariably ended with a tinny and that. Ben was there. He’d been avoiding his mother ever since her diagnosis but resurfaced the day of her death. His father probably told him, Now’s the time to come home if you’re coming, just as he did with Jon yesterday.

When asked why he’d been absent for weeks and had avoided everyone’s calls, Ben said there wasn’t anything to do. Nothing was going to change the fact that she was dying, he said, adding, I didn’t want to hear any more hopeful stories about how she might live.

I was one of the people telling those hopeful stories. I knew genetic therapy had promise. I wanted it to work. We all did. All but Ben, who was hopeless.

Ben’s mother had a deeded body. Now Ben has a deeded body. There’s no hope. No talk of hope. Ben wanted it that way with his mother and wants it that way for himself. Still, I see him as a light moving up and into a tree, where it spreads like Carl Jung’s illustration in The Red Book. I see it growing larger and larger but fainter and fainter as it expands, as it disperses, as the there of him joins the everywhere of everywhere.

The body was never a body, not really. Our bodies were never bodies. They’re Fabergé eggs that crack when they need to so the light can escape.