In developing and explaining his special and general theories of relativity, Albert Einstein relied not on laboratory experiments but thought experiments. What, for example, would it be like to ride alongside a light beam? To be in an elevator accelerating through space?
While the scientist’s boundless imagination tackled many such subjects, he likely never conceived of his own brain, more than 40 years after his death, encased in a Tupperware bowl and stuffed in a duffel bag, traveling from New Jersey to the West Coast in the trunk of a rented Buick Skylark.
Einstein died in 1955 at the age of 76. Before the cremation, Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton Hospital, removed the scientist’s brain from his skull during a routine autopsy. Although he had no authority to do so, Dr. Harvey, believing there would be benefit to studying the organ, simply kept it.
While the ashes of the scientist’s body were scattered in the Delaware River, his embalmed brain was in Harvey’s house, and that’s where it remained for decades.
The story has odd turns, and in 1998, the eccentric Harvey, then in his mid-80s, decided to deliver the brain to Einstein’s granddaughter, who was living in California. The story is detailed in full by journalist Michael Paterniti in his 2000 book “Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain.” As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the scientist, the whole saga “would seem farcical were it not so macabre.”
Einstein himself might have been untroubled by the situation. Although he often spoke of God, he didn’t believe in the personal God of Judaism and Christianity, so he might have had few concerns about religious rites and traditions surrounding death.
The celebrated writer Dorothy Parker likewise had no interest in a religious funeral or burial. Even so, her remains were treated shabbily. She once joked, “That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgement.” For many years she didn’t have a tombstone at all.
Parker named the playwright Lillian Hellman as the executor of her will. Hellman, who seemed to care less about their friendship as the years passed, settled the estate, but she never got around to seeing to the burial of Parker’s cremated remains.
After six years of unpaid storage, the funeral parlor sent a can containing Parker’s ashes to the law firm that had handled the author’s affairs. There they remained in the bottom drawer of a lawyer’s file cabinet for 15 years.
The story of Parker’s cremains, even after they left the law office, is complicated, with the ashes being taken from New York to Baltimore and back again. Some 30 years after her death, they were finally buried in a family plot.
Whereas Harvey, the Princeton pathologist, felt justified in appropriating Einstein’s brain because he believed it had a utilitarian value, Hellman considered Parker’s cremains of no worth at all.
In contrast to both, Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and essayist, writes about the importance of treating dead bodies neither as “idols” or “mere shells” but with the respect they are due.
“We deal with death by dealing with the dead, not just the idea but also the sad and actual fact of the matter – the dead body,” he writes in a 2003 essay, “Good Grief: An Undertaker’s Reflections.” He recalls disagreeing with those in favor of holding “life affirming” memorial services without a coffin or cremains present, instead of a traditional funeral.
“A funeral without the dead body has the religious significance of the Book of Job without the sores and boils, Exodus without the stench of frogs, Calvary without a cross, or the cross without the broken, breathless, precious body hanging there, all suffering and salvation. It is Easter without the resurrected body,” Lynch writes.
His recollection of the death of an indigent man illustrates the Church’s teaching that all are made in the image of God, and also the belief in both the dignity of the physical body and the immortality of the soul.
The deceased man had no family, no friends and no money. No one mourned him. Yet Lynch contacted a priest who conducted an unhurried, respectful and solemn graveside service.
“I asked him why he’d gone to such trouble,” Lynch writes. “He said these are the most important funerals – even if only God is watching – because it affirms the agreement between ‘all God’s children’ that we will witness and remember and take care of each other.”
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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