A Second Time, Mary Roach Comes Back from the Dead
Dave Weich, Powells.com
What happens to us when we die? In 2003, Mary Roach approached the question from the corporal perspective. When your body shuts down, what comes next? Some people, it turns out, keep working after death.  Stiff introduced a flourishing cadaver industry—crash test dummies, human composters, crime scene re-enactors, models for surgeons and morticians—and a science writer with a wicked sense of humor, besides. In her research, the writer came across a man named Douglas Macdougall, whose great faith inspired him to prove the soul's existence by scientific means. If a soul vacated the body upon expiration, he speculated, perhaps it would be possible to document weight loss at that instant—the weight of the soul, departing. Macdougall tried. And failed. But when it came time to follow up Stiff, Roach remembered him, and wondered what other fates death might hold in store. She asks in Spook, What happens to the part of us that isn't so easily identified? A century has passed since Macdougall's experiments. What has science had to say about spirit energy since?
Dave: For most of history, ideas about the soul have been more or less speculation, where it might be and how it got there, assuming it exists. Ideas from philosophy, not science.
Mary Roach: A couple of the anatomist/philosophers did poke around and try to locate it, most often in the head. They were doing some research, testing scalps and all that, but most of it was just speculation. Which makes sense. It belongs as much in religion and philosophy as it does in science.
Dave: But inevitably religious people in the field of science wanted to bring their two belief systems together.
Roach: Exactly. Before, it was, "Let's see if we can locate it." Later, it became, "Let's see if it exists."
Dave: As wacky as they seem, Macdougall's attempts to record weight loss at the precise moment of death, just as the soul theoretically escapes, were interesting in that respect. He approached the question as pure science.
Roach: When I made a passing reference to him in Stiff, I became intrigued for that very reason. He was really the inspiration for
Spook. He believed in the scientific method so much that he thought we could use science to pin down something as ephemeral as the soul. It was that can-do spirit.
He was a really intriguing guy, and I loved researching him. I just wished he kept a diary or a journal. I spoke to the widow of his grandson, but, alas, there's no Douglas Macdougall archive.
Dave: It makes perfect sense that belief in spirit communications peaked in the age of the telegraph and the radio. I hadn't realized that until I read Spook.
Roach: Absolutely. When you imagine a citizenry being asked to accept as fact that you can take someone's voice and transmit it through the air across the country—it's true, and here's the evidence—it wasn't so much of a leap for people to believe that a medium could be a receiver for messages from the beyond. It makes sense that that would be the peak of belief of this stuff. Also, it was after World War I, when a lot of people had lost sons. There was a need to believe, I think.
Dave: Who is credited with the idea of ectoplasm?
Roach: The first medium to produce it was a woman named Eva C., but nowhere did I find out what her inspiration was or how she decided to do this. And it was such a peculiar thing to do, to take what was most of the time cheesecloth and pass it off as an extruded physical manifestation of spirit energy.
How do you come up with that? Let alone how did anybody buy it, but how did anybody come up with that? I know! Let's spit up some cheesecloth and say this is spirit energy!
She was the first. Charles Richet, who won a Nobel Prize—he was a pioneer in the study of anaphylactic shock and thermoregulation, a very respected scientist—he got caught up with Eva C., bizarrely enough.
Dave: And people believed the mediums. Women started doing some very creative things to conceal the cheesecloth.
Roach: Creative, yes.
Dave: It took Houdini, among others, to prove it was a hoax. It's not as if this was just some quack that desperate people were taking seriously.
Roach: The Sorbonne University sponsored an ectoplasm study. Harry Price's lab did a lot of extensive work. They were cutting samples of it and sending it off for analysis. Scientific American did a five-part article, searching for a medium that could not be debunked. Margery Crandon is the one they came up with, and in the end the committee was divided. Some of them still believed everything she was doing.
It took magicians to figure it out; it took Harry Price and Houdini. Just because you have a Ph.D. doesn't mean you can figure out a magician's tricks.
Dave: In all your research, what made you most seriously consider the possibility of an afterlife?
Roach: A couple of the near-death experience studies were the most intriguing to me. Specifically, there was a study by a cardiologist named Michael Sabom. He found a group of people who'd had near-death experiences; they claimed to be up near the ceiling watching themselves being resuscitated. The descriptions they gave were very specific.
Sabom set up a control group of twenty-five people who'd been in ICU, cardiac emergency units—they were familiar with the equipment and the lingo—and he had them describe what they thought they would see if they were up above during a resuscitation. He said, "Be as detailed as you can. Describe what you'd be seeing."
He compared those two groups and their descriptions. Twenty-three of the twenty-five people in the control group made huge gaffes—defibrillators were attached to suction cups, people were being pounded on the back instead of on the chest. The group that had had the near-death experiences didn't make errors; they were pretty dead-on accurate and specific.
That was a cool approach to it, I thought. Rather than just saying, "Well, they came up with this, but then again they might have just come out of anesthesia and overheard the doctors." It was a way to get the question of, Is there evidence for them actually having been up there?
Dave: Do you expect a backlash from people attached to the idea of a soul or spirit communications?
Roach: The book has only just come out this week, but I'm anticipating a fair amount of email from people who don't like to have their beliefs challenged. I am fairly open-minded in the book, though I do apply critical thinking. I don't see it as a debunking book, though some things do get debunked.
Dave: I don't know. I've got boxes full of ectoplasm at home, and right now I'm feeling totally debunked.
Roach: Write me a letter, send it on over, and I'll reply.
Dave: In a footnote, you mention two separate occasions when you were moved to conduct experiments about the curiosity of cows. Specifically, you shouted at cows in a field and then lied down in the grass.
Roach: Yes!
Dave: Why?
Roach: When I was in college, I got into a late-night argument with somebody about whether cows are curious. He said to me, this guy Brian, that if you go out in a field and do this they'll come over. I didn't believe him, so the next chance I got I went out into a pasture and the cows were a couple football fields away; they were pretty far away. I shouted, and they looked. Then I lay down, and they literally galloped over to me and formed a ring around me.
I did it in Ireland and I've done it in California. Both times, the cows came over. Cows are curious.
Dave: Were you scared at all the first time when the galloping started?
Roach: A little nervous when they came thundering over, but I assumed they would stop. Supposedly, it's like if a buffalo herd comes charging at you, you're supposed to just put your hand out and they'll go around you. I don't really want to give that one a whirl, though.
Dave: You treat the footnotes as your opportunity to write about almost anything you want.
Roach: It's me stumbling onto something that I can't bear to leave out of the book. I get distracted easily, and I come across these things in my research.
Dave: There's a lot of lighthearted material in Spook, but also in Stiff, where the subject could be quite a downer if you didn't treat it with a light touch. The footnotes provide a valve to escape all that.
Roach: People ask, "Was that a conscious strategy in writing a book about cadavers?" I wish I could take credit, but it's just the way I write.
I did worry that the combination of humor and cadavers would be offensive to people—it could have completely backfired—but in fact I think it was helpful for people to have that, like you said, that release valve, to help relieve the tension.
Dave: It's surprising how little of the book is truly disturbing. Then there's the University of Tennessee's body farm. When you recall walking the grounds, what comes first to mind?
Roach: That moment where Arpad Vass says to me, "Actually, if you put your ear right up close, you can hear them feeding." This was a combination of not only a ghastly sight but a disturbing sound; also, if your ear is up close, so is your nose. That was a sensory onslaught I will never forget.
Dave: You describe the skin in the very early stages as looking like rice paper.
Roach: The maggots—I hate that word—under someone's skin. Right. Only under the skin, though. They look like a ball of rice when they're in someone's abdominal cavity or their eyeball or something.
Dave: You worked on Stiff for how long?
Roach: A little over a year.
Dave: Did you feel like the research was affecting the rest of your life?
Roach: In the beginning, I did. The very first cadaver I saw was at the mortuary college; they were learning how to embalm. This guy, the cadaver, had had an autopsy before he came there, which presents a bit of a challenge for a student embalmer.
I don't know if you've ever seen someone who's had an autopsy, but they're laid wide open and all their organs are in a little bag. It was a shock to the system to see that. The image lingered longer than I would have liked and seemed to pop into my head uninvited over the next few days. I did worry that I was going to be damaged by it, but it passed. That was the only time it really affected me.
I think people underestimate their ability to deal with cadavers. An anonymous body is completely different than someone you knew. That's a whole other story. In a laboratory setting, you'd be surprised how quickly a human body just begins to seem like part of the laboratory. It's similar to the supermarket—you see a piece of beef in a package, and you don't think: This is the carcass of a cow. You think it's a steak. It takes on a different identity. It's part of science, part of research. You'd be surprised how quickly people get used to it.
Dave: You mention that it's generally not upsetting to see a skeleton. We encounter them as children at the doctor's office, in classrooms...
Roach: Partly it's that we're used to it, but also bones are dry and tidy. They're aesthetically beautiful, whereas dead bodies are not beautiful, particularly once they're a few days old. Even if we weren't used to seeing skeletons in books and classrooms, they have a beauty of their own that dead bodies don't.
Dave: What have you learned about cadavers since you finished the book?
Roach: On my book tour, people told me a couple stories I would have loved to put in Stiff. One of them was a military deceit called "Operation Mincemeat."
In World War II, the Allies took a dead soldier, dressed him up in an officer's uniform, and put bogus landing plans in his pockets, along with opera tickets and other things. They looked at the tide table, and they launched him such that he'd wash up ashore where the enemy was and lead them to pull up camp and move. It's an amazing story. I think the History Channel did a piece recently.
Dave: What's the strangest question you've been asked at a reading?
Roach: At a reading for Stiff, a woman came up to me—and she looked like a fairly ordinary person, a college senior, maybe—and she said, "If a guy dies and he's lying around for two or three days, would he still be hot?" I said, "No, the body would cool down to room temperature pretty quickly."
I started going on about how many degrees the body loses. She said, "No, no, no. I mean, if he was hot, would he still be hot?"
There were people in line behind her, kind of looking horrified. It didn't seem to me that anyone had put her up to this or that she was making a joke. She seemed to have a real curiosity.
Dave: Do you have a favorite euphemism from the death and dying trades?
Roach: I actually have one from my own experience, when my mother was dying. This isn't in the book, but her doctor—not her normal doctor but the one who took over—he said to us, "Now that Clara has entered the Exodus mode..."
Dave: That didn't go over very well, I take it.
Roach: It really didn't. My brother and I were just agape. That's the most memorable. But I do like some of the ones in the mortuary handbook. They have a whole list of "don't say." Don't say "wrinkles"; say "acquired facial marks." Don't say "stiff"; say "decedent."
Dave: There's a line in the book, "A book about dead bodies is a conversational curveball."
Roach: Try being an undertaker.
Dave: Right. I wondered about your interactions with morticians.
Roach: Talking to students at that San Francisco mortuary college, I would ask, "How did you get into this trade?" And I think I mentioned in Stiff that the answer never satisfied. One of them said, "I used to watch Quincy." Well, first of all, Quincy was a pathologist. It didn't wash. This other guy, Theo, said, "I worked for a while in the travel industry and for a while in the insurance industry, but I like this because you can have an apartment right overhead, so my rent is paid." I thought, You're going to have to try harder than that.
Some people get into it for the counseling element; they want to help people. One woman said, "I feel that most people couldn't handle this job, they couldn't handle being around bodies, and it doesn't bother me so I felt that I would be helping people out. I can do it, so I should do it."
I suppose it ties back to what I was saying earlier: people underestimate how quickly you get used to anything. I imagine you get used to it. It's sometimes a job that pays very well. I don't know. I can't speak for the whole trade, but I found a lot of them very likeable. Good sense of humors. There were some really fun morticians. They're not macabre. They're not creepy. They're just folks. And since Six Feet Under, a lot of women are getting into mortuary sciences; there's been a big spike in the number of women owning their own mortuaries.
Dave: When you wrote about science for Discover, what was the best destination you ever went for a story?
Roach: Antarctica, definitely. I went on a National Science Foundation press program a few times, where you apply, you give them a proposal from your editor, and they pick up your expenses once you get down there. That was amazing. Amazing place, amazing people, amazing research being done. I loved it. I went down three times to different parts of Antartica.
Dave: What did you do there?
Roach: There was a group out in a remote camp in the middle of nowhere collecting meteorites. Antarctica is one of the few places where if you see a stone you know it came from space because there's nothing but snow and ice. It's incredible. You go out on Ski-doos with a team of five people, out on a grid, and you'll find four or five meteorites in a few hours.
That was one story. Another time I was on a ship and they were doing mud coring.
It's partly the people, too. There are really interesting folks down there. And it's gorgeous. It's not just sky and snow. There's an amazing palette of colors and light.
Dave: And now you write a column for Reader's Digest.
Roach: A humor column.
Dave: Did your parents subscribe when you were growing up?
Roach: You betcha. The first time Reader's Digest reprinted one of my stories was the only time I can remember my mother being excited about my career. That was the pinnacle, as far as she was concerned.
Dave: Stiff came from a project you worked on at Salon.com, but if someone had said to you five years ago, "You're going to write a book about cadavers and then another about the science of the afterlife," would you have been surprised?
Roach: No. You have to look at the things I was covering for Salon: the Amputee Bowling League, someone who invented a vaginal weight-lifting kit? I've always been drawn to freakish topics. I wasn't one of those kids who pulled the legs of spiders or anything, but I guess I'm easily bored.
The second book might have surprised me because only once had I reported about anything in the realm of the paranormal, but the first one wouldn't have surprised me at all. Though it wasn't a plan I had for a long time, certainly.
Dave: Read anything good lately?
Roach: I've been doing book reviews, reading for those. Of course, I'm sent books for reviewing that are of a certain nature. I've been on the weirdo beat for a while. I'm looking back to getting back to some good fiction. I try to keep up with my New Yorkers.
Dave: Good luck.
Roach: I wish they'd have an option where you could get it once every two weeks or once a month.
Dave: But then people would be asking if you'd read a particular story, and you wouldn't even have the issue to dig out. You can't win.
Have you seen the complete collection that just came out?
Roach: It has everything, right?
Dave: From every issue ever published.
Roach: I'm not getting that.
Dave: But Woody Allen! I feel like I can't not buy it, working in a bookstore and all, but I don't even have time to read the ones that come in the mail.
Roach: I don't want that thing lying around. I'd just feel guilty all the time.
Mary Roach visited Powell's City of Books on October 17, 2005. We spoke on the phone several days prior.
| 
Don't Miss
