I have not signed my organ donor card. I don't even have an organ donor card. Occasionally a sign on the wall or a PSA will ask, Have you signed your organ donor card? As if we all possess blank organ donor cards and it's simply a matter of signing them, the way you eventually get around to signing your new credit card, or writing CHECK I.D. on it in block letters. So I am not a participant in any organ donor program, and I don't know who administers such programs or how it's done, the logistics and administrative procedure, since I've never taken part in one, for reasons which reflect poorly, very poorly on me.

Understand that I fully intend to take part in an organ donor program. If I die, I would like recoverable/non-ruined parts of my dead body to be of use to the living. At the moment of my death, there will be billions of people living, and many of them would like to get their hands on various useful parts of me, for their own reasons, and signing my organ donor card, or checking the organ donor box, or filling out the necessary forms, or what have you, will allow these people to acquire these various parts of me, and I will be of use. To be of use, this is the aspiration, an admirable final wish. I could see a man hovering over me, a doctor or male nurse or maybe a passing stranger kneeling on the wet pavement, and he says "what do you want?" as he grips my hand tightly, his eyes so beautiful and gray, and I reply, in a voice choking with effort, a final effort: "...to be of use." And then I'll exhale one last time and expire, and he'll rummage through my wallet and find my organ donor card and will know that my final wish can be granted. Once I am dead, my warm remains will be whisked away on a gurney to a special room, someone will yell "stat!", and in this room my organs will be harvested, as they say, by a special team, a team of organ harvesters. This is a procedure in which your trunk is flayed open without regard for the niceties of a post-surgical appearance, since why bother and there isn't time for that now anyway, and which involves the rapid removal of all your useful parts, including your eyes. They place these various parts of you in different containers, and these containers are flown off, possibly in helicopters but more likely in regular airplanes, to distant medical centers where they are inserted into the bodies of various living people. Time is of the essence, to maintain freshness, and so your body is harvested quite brutally, it's not pretty. Once the various useful parts of you are removed, your body lies there in a state of quite dramatic disarray. Think of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, except with bloody entrails instead of straw.

These disturbing images, I am ashamed to say, are part of the reason I never participated in an organ donor program. Another reason is that I was troubled by the notion that my organs, which were instrumental in sustaining the life of a decent human being, at times a good and even exemplary human being, namely me, might find their way after my death into the body of someone I would personally dislike or whose character I would not respect, were I still alive. This is a patently ridiculous reason for refusing to take part in an organ donor program, even less defensible than the squeamishness reason, but I never claimed to be a non-ridiculous person, and anyway I already said I fully intend to take part in an organ donor program.