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 e did not obey Dirk’s last wish. We did not have his head removed and cryogenically frozen, and then have his body reduced to a pile of cinders. We did not do that; it just seemed too macabre, and the head, to tell you the truth, did not really look worth saving, what with the eyeballs missing, the nose and ears cut off. Nobody would ever want to wake up looking like that. It wasn’t just that we didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense—our access to the body was fairly well restricted. Dirk was pretty much in a cooler at the F.B.I. evidence lab, for months. We buried him in a casket when the time came. This pleased his religious relatives. The casket, obviously, was closed, but I still think the whole head freezing and incineration option would have been more troubling to us all, in particular for his mother. She had to deal with his eccentricities in life, I thought, which must have been troubling enough. To extend his bizarre and troubling rituals beyond his death, I thought, would have simply been too much.
I believe this decision was the right one. Though we still have very little idea which chemical processes were involved, I’m all but positive that whatever freak accident brought Dirk back to life would not have occurred if there had been nothing left of him but a frozen head and some ash in a jar.
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