Forever Yours

But when the family installed the humidermied Henri at the front of the eatery in his familiar pose, hand out as if ready to shake, customers weren't as pleased as the Clemenceaus had thought they would be. In fact, business seemed to dwindle with the return of Henri from Preserve A Life's then-laboratory in East Vancouver, and the Clemenceau children wanted to return the replicant of their father to the company for a complete refund.

Cunningham recalls that Preserve A Life didn't have a money-back guarantee at that time (it has since instituted one). Although the Clemenceaus sued, Preserve A Life's barristers prevailed, since Canadian national law prohibits anyone unrelated to a dead person from owning his or her remains. Even though the firm won, Cunningham and his colleagues decided it would be good for business to give the Clemenceaus their money back, but the family had to keep Henri under Canadian law.

"From what I hear, he's in a public storage vault somewhere in the Ottawa suburbs," Cunningham says. "They didn't even bother to bury or cremate him. It's a shame, because he was one of our finest early representations. If we could have kept him legally, we would have him greeting people here in the lobby of our new company headquarters in Phoenix."

The rest of the firm's customers contacted by New Times expressed positive sentiments similar to those of the Braswells.

Take Margaret Singer, a Mesa woman who works as a nurse practitioner at the Mayo Clinic in north Scottsdale. Her 7-year-old, Marvin, had been a lively, rambunctious little boy who, in defiance of his babysitter, one day licked his finger and stuck it into a live electrical outlet. The teenage sitter knocked Marvin clear of the current with a wooden chair before major damage was done to the boy's features by the electrical charge, but not in time to save his life. Singer, a single mother whose husband was killed when he was washed overboard during a deep-sea fishing trip off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, was beside herself with grief. When the funeral director suggested Preserve A Life, she thought it was a sick joke.

"At first, I was revolted, horrified!" says the attractive, 30-something redhead. "But the more I considered it, the more it appealed to me. My husband's remains were lost at sea, and all I have left of him was the fishing pole he was using when he went overboard. Then, when Marvin was electrocuted, I was afraid I'd grow old in a house full of photos of the two of them. This way, Marvin's always with me, and through him, his dad."

At Singer's home, Marvin's bedroom is just as it was when he died, filled with model airplanes, toys, plastic dinosaurs, crayons and coloring books. A pennant of his favorite team, the New York Yankees (the family hails from Long Island), is on the wall over his chest of drawers. In his little bed, Marvin lies as if asleep, draped in velvet, with flowers all around him. Singer brings out photos of one of her favorite mountings of her little boy (she paid extra to Preserve A Life so Marvin's body can be contorted to fit into several poses). One snapshot shows Marvin on a scooter, another has him wearing his Little League uniform with a big grin on his face as he's supposedly fielding a ground ball.

"As you can see from the pennant, that boy was a huge Yankees fan!" Singer muses, her eyes welling up. "He would have been so happy to see A-Rod come to the Yankees. I'm just grateful he didn't live to see that man slap that ball out of the Boston pitcher's hand the other night in the ALCS. It would have killed him to see a New York Yankee cheat to try to win a game."

She stops for a minute, looking particularly sad all of a sudden. Margaret says she keeps Marvin safe in his bed most of the time now for his own protection. "Initially, I wanted him on his scooter, in jeans and a tee shirt, as if he were playing, or in his baseball uniform. It reminded me of how it was before the tragedy. But our pet dachshund, Kipper, kept jumping up on him. I was afraid he'd become damaged. And when the neighborhood kids would see him in the uniform, they would naturally want to play ball with him. On one occasion, one of his teeth was broken when they hit him in the face with a pitch. Now I just keep him in his bed as my darling little Marvin."

Renee Carson of Mesa didn't have enough money to have the whole body of her son, Marine Lance Corporal Jefferson Carson, done.