Today the U of O held its annual memorial service for families of people who have donated their bodies to the medical school. David and Jonathan came with me (Rebecca could not get away from overwhelming pressures at work). We arrived about 10 minutes before the service was due to begin and I was surprised to see that the large room set aside for the ceremony was already packed to the rafters. We were lucky to find three seats together at the back of the long, rather narrow room. I'm glad we went. It was a brief, simple non-denominational service, not recognizable as Christian (rather than Jewish or Islamic). The head of the department of anatomy expressed his gratitude for the donated bodies, and was followed by the mother of a young man who died of a highly malignant brain tumour. She spoke most movingly. She was followed by one of the prosectors and then by two medical students, one speaking in English the other in French. The ceremony was moving and I thought, looking around the room, that many family members probably were feeling as I did, that we were taking part in a very worth-while enterprise. After the ceremony and a look at the book in which all the body donors' names are recorded, we went outside to look at the monument - a stone about a meter tall, half a meter broad, that is situated at the centre of a small grove of pine trees. It is a rather lovely setting, as the photo shows; the close-up photo of the memorial stone doesn't capture very clearly the inscription but zooming in and enlarging the image clears up that problem. This is now a memorial to Janet Wendy Last, as well as to all the others whose names are inscribed in the memorial books.
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