1) "A week ago at that time, Mom would have been reading the Valley News and doing the Jumble. As far as I know, she'd done the Jumble every morning for the past forty-five years. Sometimes in the hospital, I'd get up on the bed with her and we'd work on it together. She was bedridden, and it was one of the last things she could still do and enjoy. I looked at Rip. Should we all do the Jumble together one last time? Rip went out to the car to get the paper. We leaned on the coffin and read the clues aloud.
That was when I cried. It was the small things that got to me that week: finding her bingo winnings when we cleaned out her dresser drawers, emptying the fourteen individually wrapped pieces of chicken from her freezer, each one labeled "chicken" in her careful penmanship. And the Jumble. Seeing her cadaver was strange, but it wasn't really sad. It wasn't her."

2) "By 1828, the demands of London's anatomy schools were such that ten full-time body snatchers and two hundred or so part-timers were kept busy throughout the dissecting "season." (Anatomy courses were held only between October and May, to avoid the stench and swiftness of summertime decomposition.) According to a House of Commons testimony from that year, one gang of six or seven resurrectionists, as they were often called, dug up 312 bodies. The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off."

3) "I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary. The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain. Not that I wished her dead. I'm just saying it's easier. Cadavers, once you get used to them—and you do that quite fast—are surprisingly easy to be around.
Which is good, because at the moment, it's just he and I. Matt is in the next room, Deb has gone to look for something. UM 006 was a big, meaty man, still is. His tights are lightly stained. His leotard shows up his lumpy, fallen midsection. The aging superhero who can't be bothered to wash his costume. His hands are mittened with the same cotton as his head. It was probably done to depersonalize him, as is done with the hands of anatomy lab cadavers, but for me it has the opposite effect. It makes him seem vulnerable and toddlerlike."