Front Porch: Willing the body to be useful after death.

I never knew anyone who willed her body for scientific research upon her death. Until now.

My friend Ceslie – who, at 66, is a good bit younger than me – and her husband have made arrangements to do just that. When I learned about it, I was impressed, but also curious. My husband, Bruce, and I are organ donors, as noted on our driver’s licenses, but whole body donation – it never occurred to me.

Like a lot of people at our stage in life, we’ve had to consider what we want done with our remains when we die. We want to make those decisions for ourselves, so that our loved ones don’t have to. It’s just that willed body donation wasn’t something that popped up on my radar, so I asked Ces about her path to this choice.

Ces, who is our son Sam’s lovely mother-in-law, is a generous, open-hearted and living-large Texan who is being brought down by COPD. Although having given up smoking 12 years ago, she began having serious breathing issues in 2017, including needing intubation and being placed in an induced coma (twice) as her COPD rapidly progressed.

She’s been on oxygen since I’ve known her. Her oxygen level is at 20%, dangerously low and causing her to be severely winded just walking across the room. It has definitely clipped her wings.

At stage 4 of the disease, she knew that her survival rate was about five years. “It’s already been six,” she said. She is looking into a possible lung transplant, knowing that there are many hurdles and landmines on that path … and that even transplanted lungs, should that work out for her, have an expiration date.

Having exceeded her predicted expiration date, she feels she has nothing to lose. And so she’s begun the process to see if a transplant might work for her. Her first appointment on that journey was Aug. 2 at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

In the meantime, there’s the other reality, which she agreed I could share publicly.

About a year ago a friend in Houston told her she was going to donate her body for research, and Ces read up on the process online. She talked with her husband and children about it, and all agreed that whatever she wanted to do was OK – that it was her body, her decision.

She and BJ, who is dealing with prostate cancer, had previously decided on cremation for themselves. But they both loved the idea that their bodies could become a learning tool for students in medicine, physical therapy or other medical fields, as well as for research – well, that sealed it for them.

“It got me excited,” Ces said. “This is how teaching hospitals learn. How wonderful to be useful, even after death.”

BJ has worked in the medical field for 26 years and is on leave from his position as a telemetry technician while he cares for Ces and his 93-year-old mother Bonnie, who has advanced dementia and who lives with them.

He has seen and participated in honor walks at the hospital where he works, in which hospital employees line the hallways to show respect to an organ donor who has died and whose body is being taken through the lined corridor on the way to a surgical suite, where those organs will be removed and go to improve and extend the lives of others in need of them.

It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to join his wife in her whole-body donation decision for, as he said, the advancement and improvement of life and medical knowledge.

And so they’ve registered with the University of Texas Southwestern for that purpose. There is no cost for body pick up (they live within the 30-mile free transport radius) … or for anything at all, including cremation afterward.

Bodies can be held for several years, but when they have served their purpose, Ces learned, their cremated ashes are either returned to family or taken out to sea, where they are scattered with other cremated remains from the UT-Southwestern program.

To be frank, Ces noted that the cost of funerals, cremation and/or burials was a factor in her decision. For most of their married lives, she and BJ have had family members living with them, including, at one time, Ceslie’s terminally ill brother-in-law, and have either paid for or been involved with a number of burial experiences. That has colored her view.

One friend, she said, caught up in her grief, spent more than $10,000 for a casket for her husband, and lamented later that she couldn’t believe she let herself pay so much for “a box to put into the ground.”

Ces wants none of that for her loved ones, who can still hold some sort of service or remembrance gathering, if they choose to … but her body will be off on its final mission, and not present.

I asked my physical therapist about her own experience working with a cadaver in her studies. “Invaluable,” she told me. How did the students treat the body? Respectfully, she said, and the only personal information they were told was the person’s age – no other details. The students did informally give their assigned cadaver a first name, so that she was a person, not “the body,” and that when they were done, those of the students who wished to, were invited to write a thank you note to her, a note that was placed with her when she was cremated afterward.

Did she write her a note?

“Oh, yes,” my therapist said. “The gift she gave deserved recognition and gratitude.”

Spokane, like larger communities across the country, is home to body donation programs, each with their own protocols (not all bodies can be accepted). Washington State University’s willed body program is probably the best known locally, but a more complete list, including contact information, is available online through the Spokane County Coroner’s Office.

“I know this isn’t for everyone,” Ces said. “But I also know that since I’ve been telling friends about our choice, five of them have signed on to do it, too.”

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.