“Triumph Over the Grave” was first published and collected and is currently most readily available in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Random House).

In my early twenties, during a lost and lonely year, I worked at the Willed Body Program at the University of California San Francisco Hospital. I got the job through a temp agency called Temporama, a name that made me feel like a clown jumping out of a cake. Mostly, I sat in the windowless basement office answering the phone and filing papers. (It was the early 1990s: landline, no computer.) The tiny office was furnished with a desk and three enormous file cabinets stuffed with paperwork. My job was simple: field calls from people who wanted to donate their bodies to science. On the phone, I spent a lot of time explaining the meaning of whole body donation (yes, all of you), why it was bodies were not returned to the families after the medical students were done with them (there's not much left), the ceremony held at the end of every semester in which the cremains of the donated bodies were scattered at sea. I talked potential donors through the Willed Body questionnaire, explaining the medical conditions that prevented acceptance as a donor (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, extensive trauma at the time of death, advanced decomposition). No, an amputation didn't preclude acceptance. Yes, transportation of your body is paid for by the Program. Yes, that is the number your next-of-kin should call to notify the transport service you are dead and your body is ready for transport to the UCSF morgue.

Many of the people I spoke with were at that time of life marked by emergency rooms, hospitals, funerals, the age of deep aloneness in which they found themselves talking on the phone with a long-term temp from Temporama. These were the people who wanted to talk far beyond the questionnaire, loathe to return to the ache and hum of their empty homes. I was loathe to return to the ache and hum of my own loneliness and so, on slow days (there were a lot of them), we talked; rather, they talked, I listened.