What does it mean when the list for
your checkup starts “flu shot” and ends
“body donation?” When he comes in and
you ask him this, your doctor jokes, “Let’s
hope the one doesn’t lead to the other.”

You hadn’t thought of that. You’d brooded:
start with present prudence, ending in future
preparedness. How far future? If you knew
when the donation was to take place you might
not bother with the flu shot. Or vitamins or
the gym three times a week for resistance
training; there’s more to resist than weights,
God knows. You’d concern yourself with that:

what God knows, or if God knows, or if God
is known, forgoing your current obsession of
recording your weight each day, or how much
weight you resist on the gym’s infernal machines.
The infernal may be a moot issue theologically
these days, but surely knowing the date of
its personal beginning, any possible afterlife
would preoccupy you. And if there is none, how
can it begin? Is it rather the date of its non-
appearance? The date when the question itself
becomes moot, as you do too, moot and mute.

Still, listing “body donation” doesn’t mean
you know when disposing of your dead body
will be a live issue. For you, it won’t be;
somebody else will be stuck with the corpse,
the complication, the need to be complicit
in the removal of all traces of your existence,
muting the ever more remote fact of your
being and non-being as if it were a cough
or sneeze someone with the flu tries and
succeeds in stifling. Meanwhile, this waiting
room is chilly, not stifling, a temperature
more appropriate for body donation than
flu shot. Shivering, all you can do is rejoice
you’re here for the latter, that trivial matter.

© by Sandra Kohler.
Used with the author’s permission.