This is in an interesting incident. It happened almost a year ago and involved a corpse in the city of Bellingham, which is really just a suburb of Vancouver, B.C. (Mount Vernon is Seattle's last northern suburb.) According to Seattle Times, a Bellingham man died on July 31, 2018, in an ambulance. Because there was a “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) order on the body, the hospital refused to have anything to do with it. The paramedics were then told by the city's medical examiner to take the corpse to the fire station and leave it there until it could be transported to a business that prepares corpses for human death rituals, a funeral home. (Crows also have death rituals, and they can be even louder than those conducted by humans.)

While the corpse was on the fire station's concrete floor, something socially useful happened. The firefighters and paramedics of the Bellingham Fire Department practiced "inserting endotracheal tubes into [it] 15 times." This procedure is called intubation. It does nothing to the dead, because the dead are nothing like the living. But the procedure does save lives. For the fire department, all of this was pretty routine; you get a corpse, you use it to improve a medically important skill. How can a reasonable person see something wrong in that? But it turns out that the Bellingham man has a family that sees a lump of dissociating matter as exactly the same as the living person who was once in their lives.

The Bellingham Herald supposedly "broke" the story of how this corpse "was used for intubation practice by 11 Bellingham Fire employees." This story reached people who were related to the man who is now a memory (or a collection of ideas). We can be very certain that the Bellingham man felt nothing and saw nothing when his corpse had a tube in what used to function as a throat. He was not around for this. He was no longer himself. He can only be represented, not be present. The upset family is now suing the city for something its first responders never did from a rational perspective. The city, the public, did not practice a medical procedure on the Bellingham man because the Bellingham man was not there, on the concrete floor of the fire station.

What this whole Bellingham story exposes is two significant failures on our society's part. One, it has not made clear to its citizens what death actually is. There is no life after a personality has ceased to be reproduced, to be part of a material system that's structured and maintained by energy flows, the main of which originates from the nuclear fusion within one of trillions of stars. Two, the public good must always stand above personal or family feelings. Why did the Bellingham family feel horror at something that's clearly not horrible, but obviously socially useful? Because, as a whole, the public-spirit feeling in many Americans is stunted. We can blame our education system for this.

If I learned that the lifeless lumps of matter that remained after my father's passing—he has been dead for almost a decade—were used by Seattle's fire department to practice a life-saving procedure, how could I not have seen this as anything but beautiful. The fact is that a corpse is loveless. Another fact is that one must love life more than all else. And there is little that's more alive than the public spirit. Using the no-thing that was once a person—say, my father—to save the lives of people I do not know is something that's just too wonderful for words.