When having my hair cut, I am always startled to see my hair in the trash can. The pile of hair looks familiarly like my head, yet now I am mixed among food scraps and snotty tissues. A part of me which, until today, I washed and combed daily and based my self-esteem on will soon line a rat's nest in a landfill.

Similarly, since seventy-five percent of indoor dust is dead skin cells, cleaning my house is a chore of throwing myself away. When I wipe my desk, I am wiping up my face that fell off. If I breathe too much, I irritate my own lungs and sneeze myself back out.

Whatever dies of us is promptly discarded. Death will be our full and final relegation to rubbish. Alive, we were endowed with sacred, inalienable rights—by our Creator, our courts, our moral codes—but no sooner will we die than the living will stuff us in wooden trash bins and bury us in landfills of human bodies, where they can remember us without the horror of seeing or smelling us. Death transforms the body from earth's most precious to its most repulsive substance.