Free Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

together, we have the heart and the lungs. We have the liver. Pancreas. Stomach. Brain. All these things, what are they? Combinations of elements! Combine them—combine the combinations—and you’ve got a person! We call it Uncle Craig, or your father, or me. But its just these combinations, these parts put together and running in a certain particular way, for the time being. Then what happens is that one of the parts gives out, breaks down. In Uncle Craig’s case, the heart. So we say, Uncle Craig is dead. The person is dead. But that’s just our way of looking at it. That’s just our human way. If we weren’t thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dying—well not dying, changing, changing is the word I want, changing into something else, all those elements that made the person changing and going back into Nature again and reappearing over and over in birds and animals and flowers—Uncle Craig doesn’t have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!”
    â€œI’ll get carsick,” I said. “I’ll vomit.”
    â€œNo you won’t.” My mother, in her slip, rubbed cologne on her bare arms. She pulled her navy blue crepe dress over her head. “Come and do me up. What a dress to wear in this heat. I can smell the Cleaners on it. Heat brings out that smell. Let me tell you about an article I was reading just a couple of weeks ago. It ties in perfectly with what I’m saying now.”
    She went into her room and brought back her hat, which she put on in front of my little bureau mirror, hastily scraping the front hair underneath and leaving some back tails out. It was a pillbox hat of a hideous colour popular during the war—Air Force Blue.
    â€œPeople are made up of parts,” she resumed. “Well when a person dies—as we say—only one part, or a couple of parts, may actually beworn out. Some of the other parts could run thirty, forty years more. Uncle Craig, for instance—he might have had perfectly good kidneys that a young person with sick kidneys could use. And this article was saying—someday these parts will be used! That’s the way it will be. Come on downstairs.”
    I followed her down to the kitchen. She started putting her rouge on, at the dark mirror over the kitchen sink. For some reason she kept her make-up there, on a sticky tin shelf above the sink, all mixed up with bottles of dark old pills, and razor blades and tooth powder and Vaseline, no tops on anything.
    â€œTransplant them! For instance eyes. They are already able to transplant eyes, not whole eyes but the cornea, I think it is. That’s only the beginning. Someday they’ll be able to transplant hearts and lungs and all the organs that the body needs. Even brains—I wonder, could they transplant brains? So all these parts won’t die at all, they’ll go on living as part of somebody else. Part of another combination. Then you won’t be able properly to speak of death at all. ‘Heirs of the Living Body.’ That’s what the article was called. We would all be heirs of one another’s bodies, we would all be donors too. Death as we know it now would be done away with!”
    My father had come down, in his dark suit.
    â€œWere you planning to discuss these ideas with the folks at the funeral?”
    In a back-to-earth voice my mother said, “No.”
    â€œBecause they do have a different set of notions, and they might easy be upset.”
    â€œI never mean to upset anybody,” cried my mother. “I never do! I think it’s a beautiful idea. It has its own kind of beauty! Isn’t it better than Heaven and Hell? I can’t understand people, I never can make out what they really believe. Do they think your Uncle Craig is wearing some kind of white nightshirt and floating around Eternity this very minute? Or do they