Several of my friends asked me, what books are you taking on vacation? When I told them Winning the Future by Newt Gingrich, they understood. When I included Death’s Acre by Dr. Bill Bass, they were perplexed. I read Death’s Acre for one reason, it is the mandatory summer read for all Farragut High School students.
Would I have purchased a copy and read it for any other reason. Probably not. This goes back to the philosophy that Newt talked about in Winning the Future and that I have always practiced with my kids. The only exception, I tried to read Harry Potter when my oldest son started reading them with the first release but I just couldn’t. Otherwise when my kids are reading a book, I read it also. My kids are baffled sometimes when they start singing a song from the radio they hear and I complete the line. As a parent, we should always be aware of what is going on in the culture, community and with our kids.
Now back to the book, Dr. Bass has had an interesting life. The stories from the Indian burial sites in South Dakota and how, when he was pressed for a tight time line to find the burial site. He used the ants to determine the burial sites. The stories of Colonel Shy and Dr. Bass missing the date of death by 113 years.
There are so many great stories in the book. The Zoo Man chapter was especially interesting to me. The reason is that from 1994-1998, I served on the Knox County Jail Inspection Committee. I was appointed by the Knox County Commission, I served as a member one year and Chairman for the additional three years. In that capacity the committee would speak with Thomas “Zoo Man” Huskey and all other inmates of the four Knox County Correctional facilities to check their housing conditions and to ensure that there were no grievances for mistreating by officers or administration.
It was interesting to read about the case of Chigger Hardin who two years after he died, was discovered outside the Tri-State Crematory. His body was believed to be in an ash box. How working with the families Attorney from Cleveland, TN Bill Brown they were able to properly dispose of Chigger Hardin’s body in the way that he wished to have his earthly body disposed of.. A proper cremation. I consider Bill Brown a friend, he currently serves on the Cleveland City School Board, I was able to make his acquaintance while we both served on the Tennessee School Boards Association Board of Directors and the Tennessee Legislative Network of the Association.
The one major disappointment that I have in this book, is that as Dr. Bass dealt with the loss of his first wife of 40 years, his mother and his second wife. His father died of a self-inflicted gun shot, when Dr. Bass was much younger. Dr. Bass departed from his view of God and an afterlife.
“All my life I’d been a believing Christian. I wasn’t without doubts-what thinking person ever is?-but still I trusted in the existence of a loving God. I’d grown up in the church;I’d taught Sunday school for years; I’d taken youth groups to Mexico for summer mission projects. But that instant in the ER – the instant Annette died – I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too” “As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward.”
He goes on to to quote a Greek philosopher some 2,500 years ago. I suspected at the time I read this that it was his grief speaking and surely at the end of the book. A Sunday school teacher, youth mission leader and practicing Christian would resolve that this is the grief speaking. Not a follower of our loving and living God.
And then in the chapter Ashes to Ashes he explains driving to Noble, GA home of the Tri-State crematory. In what I took as sarcastic tone (my interruption’s, I could be wrong) “A sign directs the faithful to Center Point Baptist Church (“Where Jesus is King”), a few hundred yards down the road on the right.”
And finally in one of the last chapters of the book entitled And When I Die, he removes all doubt. “Once upon a time I believed in an afterlife. I believed in it for fully sixty years after my father shot himself. But when Ann died, and then Annette died, and suddenly nothing I’d grown up believing about God and heaven made any sense to me any longer. We’re organisms; we’re conceived , we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living; plants and bugs and bacteria.”
I am not sure that is real relevant to have this thoughts and ideology on God and the afterlife spread throughout the book. However, I am not the author and Dr. Bass is.
I do not understand how a man that is considered an expert witness in life and death cases in courtrooms all across America. A man that has seen the complex human body in the its most defenseless state and he has concluded (due to tough breaks) that there is not a God directing the affairs of men and women and how the only joy and life that we have is here on earth, that there is no afterlife. That belief by Dr. Bass is amazing to me.
Does Dr. Bass have a right to have his beliefs and do I have a right to my beliefs? Absolutely. Do I believe Dr. Bass is wrong and I am right? Yes. Would Dr. Bass think that I am wrong and he is right? I would assume so. When our individual lives are over. We will know know that answer, individually.
