This is probably my favorite bit of dialog of all time:
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is not. Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no... What you've been is not on boats.
Rosencrantz: I wish i was dead.
I've been reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Everyone should read this book; it's absolutely fascinating. And funny. It's very funny. To wit:
. . . [T]he anatomists were men who had clearly been successful in objectifying, in their own minds at least, the dead human body. Not only did they view dissection and the study of anatomy as justification for unapproved disinternment, they saw no reason to treat the unearthed dead as entities worthy of respect. It didn't bother them that the corpses would arrive at their doors, to quote Ruth Richardson, "compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, . . . trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams . . ." So similar in their treatment were the dead to ordinary items of commerce that every now and then boxes would be mixed up in transit. James Moores Ball, author of The Sack-'Em-Up Men, tells the tale of the flummoxed anatomist who opened a crate delivered to his lab expecting a cadaver but found instead "a very fine ham, a large cheese, a basket of eggs, and a huge ball of yarn." One can only imagine the surprise and very special disappointment of the party expecting very fine ham, cheese, eggs, or a huge ball of yarn, who found instead a well-packed but quite dead Englishman.
Nobody was more surprised than I was to find myself reading about dead human bodies and laughing out loud. The book is a very satisfying read.