Lucinda Denton, 84, signed up as a Body Farm donor years ago. Why not? She says. “If you are dead, you are dead.”
KNOXVILLE, Tennessee – The way Lucinda Denton sees it, when you’re dead, you’re dead.
So why let your remains rot in the ground when they could be used for science? She never liked gravestones anyway.
The 84-year-old West Knox County resident signed the papers years ago to donate her body to the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility, better known as Body Farm.
“The idea of being buried – that’s the end. But when you go to the Body Farm, you are useful – you are useful for research! ”Said Rocky Mount, NC, native, mother of three and grandmother of seven.
Your family understands what they want. Her late husband Harold understood her wishes, although he himself was not interested in going to the three acre site near the University of Tennessee Medical Center.
One day, hopefully while at her wooded home on Fort Loudoun Lake, she will go in peace, she said. Then it’s time to get Lucinda and take her to the Body Farm.
Who knows? Perhaps the former teacher is wearing the Body Farm T-shirt that her son gave her for his birthday a few years ago.
The administrators of the Forensic Anthropology Center at UT keep saying it: You can’t do science without donor organs. You are forever grateful for the people who choose to donate their remains.
“We have the utmost respect for our donors,” said FAC research associate Mary Davis.
Some at the center even made the decision to donate themselves, including Davis and veteran Associate Director Lee Meadows Jantz.
“I plan to donate,” said Davis. “I firmly believe in the work we do and I know firsthand that we cannot do this work without our donors. So I plan to continue this work after I die.”
Would-be donors must go through an application process.
Hundreds have done it in the past 40 years. According to FAC Director Dawnie Steadman, more than 5,000 people are “pre-donors,” which means they have been reviewed and are on the system.
You can find more information about body donation here. You cannot accept everyone who wants to donate. No one is admitted who is HIV-positive or who has had tuberculosis, for example.
They also cannot accept people who have been embalmed.
Once you are accepted into the program, you will be given a donor card to keep in your wallet or personal papers, Davis said.
While most of the people participating in the program have made arrangements long before they die, sometimes donations come suddenly. For example, there have been cases where after death the family decided that a member’s remains should be handed over quickly.
What’s going on at the body farm
It is possible that, as part of research, a person’s body has been exposed to trauma. In the name of science, their bones could be broken. Donors and families will be informed in advance of any objections.
It is advisable for donors and families to discuss a donor’s wishes, Steadman said.
“Not everyone in the family may understand or agree, but as long as they know that these are your wishes and why, they are more likely to get them,” she said.
Many people who are planning to donate are already enrolled in a research program.
Denton, for example, is doing long-term biometric research for the military on face recognition and how well a face can be recognized during decomposition. Your face was photographed in life; it is also photographed in death.
Body Farm does not pick up your remains from your home or nursing home. But someone from the center will drive within 100 miles of anywhere in Tennessee to collect your body and bring it back to Knoxville if it’s in a hospital, forensic medicine, or funeral home, for example.
The FAC has a special phone that is carried all the time by someone called a Red Phone. Steadman is one of the people in charge of answering.
It’s a phone families can call with questions about the donation program. And it’s the phone that a funeral home or the police will call when it’s time to pick up a body.
Donors will be taken to a reception center in the William M. Bass Forensic Anthropology Building, named for Body Farm founder Bill Bass, where they will be cataloged and tagged. Most of them end up at the nearby body farm. They can be buried, placed on the ground under a black tarp, or left outdoors.
Students and researchers may study them for a year or two, examining everything from the rate of decomposition to the effects of scavengers like raccoons and vultures on decay rates.
There are 150 to 200 bodies in the center at any given time, Steadman said.
When a research project ends, a donor’s remains go back to the Bass building. This time they are scrubbed, picked and cleaned by the students. If necessary, crock pots are available in the laboratory for boiling small pieces of mummified tissue and cartilage.
The lab is working to make sure each and every one of your 206 bones comes back to the reception center.
After they are all cleaned, they are numbered and ready to be packaged and placed in the Bass Donated Skeletal Collection in Strong Hall on the UT campus.
Each dispenser box contains the catalog number, gender and age.
The skeleton collection includes more than 1,800 people, the oldest of whom was born in 1892. Bass began the collection in conjunction with the establishment of Body Farm in 1981.
Even when a donor at Strong stands on a giant shelf between huge rows of wrapped bones, his educational contributions go on. Your bones could still be used for further study.
If they wish, family members can visit the bones of a loved one. Staff will also talk to them about the type of research that has been done on the remains, Jantz said.
When she started working with families years ago, Jantz said, employees were reluctant to say too much because they didn’t want to upset anyone. However, over time, she has found that sons, daughters, siblings, and grandchildren are actually curious and eager to learn more about a donor’s time at UT.
While teaching science in the Washington, DC area, Denton told her students that maybe she could just donate her body so that one day her skeleton could be displayed in the classroom.
“And they said, Mrs. Denton, who should we know it’s you? And I said, look at those teeth!” she remembered and opened wide.
That was before Denton knew about Body Farm. She became interested in becoming a donor after moving with her husband, the retired head of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in the 1990s.
She read Bill Bass’s books, fiction and non-fiction, and she even met the retired forensic anthropologist and eventually told him that she wanted to be part of the program. He told her how to register.
Her decision to donate is often discussed in Denton’s family, she said. Harold Denton was cremated four years ago after his death. When he died, the family eventually gathered to celebrate his life over a long weekend in the North Carolina mountains.
This is what Denton prefers. No funeral.
When she was a kid in Rocky Mount, Denton’s family went to the cemetery every Sunday to see their grandfather and the family grave. They fixed the flowers, tended the grass.
Little Lucinda had her own mission.
“They forced me to use a toothbrush and a small bucket of water to clean the bird droppings from the tombstone, so I have a very negative feeling about tombstones,” she said.
Denton hopes there is an afterlife, but she’s not convinced that anyone has proven it actually exists.
Instead, she focuses on living a full life. Three years ago she went kite flying with her son. She loved riding roller coasters until her orthopedic surgeon told her it was time to stop.
When the time comes, it’s off to the Body Farm – the next chapter of the journey.
“I want it to be used for something good, so I feel like the Body Farm and all the scientists there can use my body. I don’t know what. But whatever it is, I’m in the game!”
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