Death has also been a mystery for all nations, religions, and societies – there is a huge amount of variants of what happens to the human body and soul after death, but nobody knows for sure. As everyone understands, nobody has ever returned from that side of the world, so we as living beings who are temporarily on the Earth only have to guess and make suppositions about what will happen to us there.
This is why they are urged to be “helplessly polite” when speaking about death. Death is practically always accompanied by the grief of people who lose a relative, a beloved, or a close friend – it is very hard to put up with the tragedy because it is never timely. Thus, the soft and extremely delicate attitude to death has been formed in the course of centuries – people are afraid to touch the strings of others’ souls, thus using multiple euphemisms and descriptive phrases to define it.
Mary Roach tries to break the stereotypes, and from the very start, she tries to speak plainly and straightly about cadavers to disillusion the readers and explain her attitude to death as nothing exceptional. This is why the first thing she thinks about the woman who is responsible for decapitating cadavers in the first chapters is the one who “cuts off heads.” She also speaks very sincerely about human beings as materials for human compost and the usage of cadavers in various kinds of testing – thus, she contradicts the usual manner of speaking about dead people and destroys all stereotypes connected with death.