Forever Yours

Cunningham struts with pride as he shows off Preserve A Life's state-of-the art, 62,000-square-foot facility. It's divided into four parts. The first deals with pre-taxidermied treatment of the body, and there are a number of steel bathtubs in which deceased persons are submerged into a yellowish, translucent goop. The entire room is refrigerated, so there's minimal decomposition, and the bodies look like so many children's dolls encased in lemon Jell-O. After about a week of this, the corpses are placed on a conveyor belt where they're transported either to a freeze-drying chamber or to the skinning and tanning workroom -- where it's taxidermy the old-fashioned way.

"I wish they were all freeze-dried, to tell you the truth," confesses Cunningham, as he shows off a huge cylindrical tube that can hold up to six bodies at a time. "This freeze-dryer completely eliminates the need for us to dispose of the skeleton or the viscera, as is necessary with our traditional humidermy process. There, the next of kin can choose to have everything but the skin returned to them for burial or cremation. Or they could donate it to science, and we'll ship it out to a university for them.

"Freeze-drying eliminates all that. First, we freeze the body as hard as a block of ice; then this baby [the freeze-dryer] sucks out 86.8 percent of the body's frozen moisture, leaving an almost completely desiccated replicant that's only a fraction of the original weight. If you think about it, the human body is mostly water, so a 250-pound man will weigh less than 50 pounds after an eight-month treatment. That's the rub. It takes too long, and people want immediate gratification. Regular humidermy only takes about four or five weeks, by comparison."

But there are drawbacks to both procedures. With freeze-drying, it's difficult to do realistic enhancements afterward, like breast or penile enlargement, because the implants cannot survive the freeze-drying process. Also, with freeze-drying, if the individual in question is obese, there may be some leakage of fat once the replication process is complete. And finally, because the skin is not "tanned" the old-fashioned way, vermin have been known to lay eggs in the dried flesh. "For some pests, like moths or cockroaches, a freeze-dried corpse is like a big hunk of beef jerky," admits Cunningham.

With humidermy, the process is more laborious and expensive. One average humidermied male can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000, mainly because of the amount of time skilled craftsmen have to spend re-creating the individual. Freeze-drying takes longer, but machines do most of the hard work, with only a technician or two to oversee the process. So a child, infant or small dog can be freeze-dried for as little as $6,000, and an adult for $10,000. But you get what you pay for, Cunningham says. With humidermy, if you so choose, all the benefits of plastic surgery are possible to make your loved one look better than he or she did when alive.

For those who can't afford to have the entire body preserved, Preserve A Life offers a plethora of less expensive options. For $1,750 (discounts are sometimes available), you can have just the individual's head mounted on a plaque, and for $750, the limb of your choice. (One lady actually had her husband's right arm taxidermied, with the hand holding a removable ashtray.) A swatch of your loved one's skin can be treated and affixed to a pillowcase or a blanket, so that you can always have him or her next to you -- which Cunningham considers a bargain at $250. And ears, toes and fingers are dead cheap, from $50 to $100 to preserve. Cunningham says the most popular use of these "leftovers" is as key-chain fobs, which, he asserts, "make great conversation pieces."

Always the cheerleader for his and Crittenden's enterprise, Cunningham says, "We say Preserve A Life -- whose acronym is PAL -- because we preserve your PAL for life. Because now, death never means having to say goodbye. For years, people here in the States have been taxidermying and freeze-drying their pets. Finally, they can enjoy the same results with their lost human loved ones."

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In a survey of all of Preserve A Life's clientele, garnered from a list provided by the East Vancouver and Maricopa County health departments and from the company itself, New Times discovered only one family that was unhappy with its decision to preserve a loved one for personal use.

That family resides in Ottawa, Ontario, where its patriarch once owned a popular French restaurant. The restaurateur's children had thought a humidermied version of their dead papa might soothe customers accustomed to seeing his smiling face greeting them as they entered to dine. Indeed, when he wasn't up front, Henri Clemenceau would go from table to table taking care of his regulars, pouring wine refills himself and telling what the wait staff lovingly referred to as his "joke du soir."