In February 2025, I received an invitation to a group funeral for my mother and 72 deceased strangers. As I scanned the details, my head felt light. I’d pushed to the back of my mind the idea that Mum was still out there having a final earthly experience, away from those of us who knew and loved her. For the past 18 months, as I learned how to live in a world without my mother, she’d been teaching students at the University of Dundee — many of whom had never seen a dead body before cutting into hers. My mother, Sylvia Thomson, registered to be a body donor in 2014, when she was 68 years old. She was living in Scotland, where I grew up, and broke the news to me in Canada by email — the week before I turned 40:

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DATE: July 6, 2014 SUBJECT: unfortunate combination!

Just to say I sent off your birthday card on Saturday. Did I mention that I’d also be sending details of body donation? Anyway, sorry they’re both in the same envelope. Don’t think of it as an extra birthday present!

I’ll speak to you on Sunday. Lots of love Mum xxxx

This was very Mum: generous, unconventional, pragmatic.

Why waste a body you don’t need anymore? Why separate major life and death milestones? Why not save a stamp? My three siblings, who still lived in the United Kingdom, also received copies of the Declaration of Bequest along with instructions for what to do on D-day — although, lucky for them, not on their birthdays. We all acknowledged how brave Mum’s decision was, but it was too unsettling to think — let alone talk — about the prospect of her body on a dissection table. Besides, our mother swam laps, ate her greens and chased her grandkids around the park. Everyone assumed she’d live to at least 100.

Less than a decade after that birthday, in June 2023, a tentacled beast of a tumour invaded the brilliant brain that made Mum both a whiz at mental arithmetic and the family Scrabble champion. Her illness began with hallucinations: seeing my six-year-old niece under her bed; a dead uncle in the garden.

Within weeks, she was losing physical and cognitive functions. A neurologist did a biopsy, and we learned my mother had glioblastoma the same day singer Sinéad O’Connor died, in late July. Afterwards, I sat on the back doorstep and sobbed into my tea. “Nothing Compares to U” played on the radio all day. A few days later, the neurologist met with Mum to tell her the tumour was untreatable and deliver her prognosis: “Three to six months,” he said.

By early August, my Mum, who’d won prizes for her short stories and poems, could neither read nor write. The last text I remember sending her was an uncaptioned photo of my kitten peering over my overalls — the universal love language of cat pics. She replied with scrambled letters, punctuation marks and emojis. It read like a message from a malfunctioning robot. I decoded it as “I love you too.”

At her final cognitive assessment, Mum couldn’t recall the day of the week or where she was, yet in the days leading up to her death, she could still articulate what mattered. When the hospital chaplain asked if she was afraid, she answered calmly: “No.” Once my mother was back home, my sister, Juliet, asked if she still wanted to donate her body to medical science. “Yes,” Mum said, pointing across her living room. “The paperwork’s in that filing cabinet.” I wish we’d asked more questions at that point about what inspired her to donate her body — but even then, we still thought we had time.

On Aug. 8, 2023, scarcely a week after Mum got her prognosis, my elder brother, Richard, phoned. She was already gone.

After the paramedics called time of death, my family rang the University of Dundee’s bequeathal administrator. A few hours later, my mother was transported from the cozy living room of her cottage to the unknown of the mortuary at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification. We were so shocked by Mum’s quick demise that it was hard for us to think about what was going to happen next.

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy and bad PR as human anatomy,” Mary Roach writes in her 2003 bestseller Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The discipline’s origin story is grim: Herophilus (c. 335–280 BCE), hailed as the Father of Anatomy and reviled as the Butcher of Alexandria, is rumoured to have dissected living criminals to learn more about the inner workings of the body.

Around two millennia later, when Scotland entered a golden age of intellectual and scientific enlightenment, anatomy became a burgeoning field of inquiry. Chronic cadaver shortages followed, and medical students had the option of paying their tuition in cash or corpses. Prior to the introduction of the Anatomy Act in 1832, the only cadavers that could be legally used in classrooms across the United Kingdom were those of convicted murderers or prisoners, as well as bodies that went unclaimed 48 hours after death. Others were supplied by resurrectionists (a.k.a. body snatchers), who went to graveyards under the cover of night and dug........

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