This is a psychologically difficult, but interesting question - how we treat ourselves after death. Someone is categorically against organ donation and even cremation. He needs traditional funeral procedures, and in a beautiful coffin and according to certain rules. And also a large beautiful mausoleum or at least a marble stele with an angel (although often these are "Wishlist" of relatives and friends). Personally, I am most likely completely calm about what will happen after my death - this is not the point and this should not leave a trace on Earth. Not that I was striving to “give the body to science” - I just probably don't care.
Here is one interesting person who actually bequeathed himself and his friends to science …
Grover Sanders Krantz (1931-2002) was known as a teacher, pet lover, eccentric anthropologist, and the first hominolo scientist.
Before his death, Krantz said: “I have been a teacher all my life, and I think that I can teach after death, so why should I give my body to science. But there is one condition: my dogs must be next to me."
Grover Krantz was an interesting person, he collected animal skeletons, in his senior years he published a scientific article on the differences between the bones of dogs and coyotes. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees, but dropped out of his doctoral program after having an argument with the professor. He did not get along with the professors at all, as he challenged them and was not tactful.
At 32, after two divorces and a failed professorial career, his work stagnated.
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And then he bought a puppy. As big as himself (Krantz was tall). He named the puppy Clyde.
Clyde continued to grow and Krantz, as a scientist, meticulously measured his growth rates. Ultimately, Clyde reached 72 kg and, standing on his hind legs, was over 2.1 m tall.
“Grover loved this dog. Wherever he went, he took Clyde with him."
Clyde slept on an old sleeping bag on the floor beside Krantz's bed. One night, Krantz came home drunk and flopped onto the sleeping bag with Clyde. "In the morning I woke up on the floor and found the dog sleeping on his bed," he wrote. "Fair exchange, I suppose."
But wolfhounds tend to have a short life, and Clyde has aged. He lost weight and drooped. The dog suffered from pneumonia and died in January 1973.
“His death left me with the empty, lonely feeling of my life, before and after,” writes Krantz.
Krantz buried Clyde in the frozen ground of his lawn. He had already buried many animals there, ranging from the banal knocked down on the road to the African lion. In anthropology, the cheapest way to study skeletons is to bury dead animals and then dig them up after their bodies have decayed, which takes about a year. But this time it was different. This time he was burying a friend.
“It looked like he had lost a child,” recalls the professor of anthropology, one of Krantz's former students.
Krantz fell sharply into a deep depression. Within six months, his next marriage broke up.
One day, a couple of years later, Krantz decided to dig up Clyde to add a dog skeleton to his collection. But when he saw his dog's skull in the mud, he stopped. He went into the house and drank a great deal of wine for courage. He then returned to the street and continued digging and drinking until he was finished. Clyde's skeleton was a magnificent specimen - the largest dog Krantz had ever seen. When he cleansed it, he reflected on the bitterness of love.
“Maybe we shouldn't be so attached to other beings, be they humans, dogs or anyone else,” he wrote. “By giving ourselves so much to them, we only make ourselves vulnerable to the pain of losing them. But if we didn't do that, we wouldn't be human?"
Krantz brought in other Irish wolfhounds: Ikki, Yahu and Ralph. He loved them all, but not as much as Clyde.
On Valentine's Day 2002, Krantz died at his home of pancreatic cancer after battling the disease for eight months. There was no funeral at his request. Instead, he wished that his body be sent to the University of Tennessee's "corpse farm", where scientists are studying the decay rates of the human body, to aid the forensic science.
In 2003, his skeleton arrived at the National Museum of Natural History (Washington), where it was displayed alongside the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds - Clyde, Ikki and Yahu.
In 2009, Krantz's skeleton was put on display along with the skeleton of his beloved dog Clyde, simulating their famous joint photograph, and exhibited in the museum hall.
His fourth wife, did not visit his skeleton in the museum, it is too hard for her. But after death, she thinks to join her husband and dogs and thus become the first pair of skeletons.