Forever Yours

She opted for a head-mounting, and a military burial for the remainder of the corpse paid for by the Corps. Renee confirms that Preserve A Life waived its $1,700 fee for the war hero. It was a good thing, too, that she chose the limited procedure, since Jeff Carson's body was mutilated when he stepped on a land mine while attempting to take an Iraqi child and a fellow Marine to safety during the first few days of the invasion. The mine blew him apart as he was holding the little girl in one arm and dragging his buddy with the other. The child was saved, but he and his buddy weren't so lucky. Both were awarded the Purple Heart posthumously, and Carson received the Medal of Honor. Wearing his camouflage hat and a stern expression, Jeff Carson's head is displayed on a living room wall next to his framed medals, a signed letter from President George W. Bush, and photos of the 20-year-old in and out of uniform.

"This is good enough for me, if I can't have him alive," says the proud mother. "Not only did Jeffy get the 21-gun salute, but he's here, next to his medals. I see him all the time. Sometimes, it seems like he's going to come right out of that wall and say, 'Mom, I love you!'"

For Leonard Scholl of Gilbert, verisimilitude was also a big part of having his new bride, Cynthia Scholl, humidermied. They'd only been married three days when Cynthia was impaled by a cast-iron pipe that had jostled loose from an 18-wheeler in front of them as they were making their way up the Pacific Coast Highway along the California coast. Driven by an intense desire to be with his beloved, Scholl gave Preserve A Life a call after seeing one of their ads, and they fulfilled Scholl's request to have the brown-eyed lass installed in his bedroom, wearing only her negligee.

"It's either this or suicide," says Scholl, glancing over at the provocative frame of his love, then removing a sheet to demonstrate what he considers Preserve A Life's superior job on his Cynthia.

"Our favorite time was Friday night. After work and dinner out, we would get comfortable, lie in bed and drink a glass or two of good Merlot before, well, you know. I still cherish that night of the week with her, and when I wake up the next morning, she's there beside me. As long as I can hold her hand in mine, I'll be happy."

As Bryce Cunningham likes to maintain, the possibilities are limited only by a family member's imagination, the prime factor in Preserve A Life's decision that it will go public next year.

"The funeral industry in this country is a guaranteed cash cow of $10 billion a year," he notes. "If Preserve A Life captures only part of that market over the next decade, we're going to make our investors very, very happy. Our closest competitor is ALCOR, but they're offering only the possibility that maybe one day you'll be brought out of the deep freeze. 'Give us your money today, and take us on faith,' they're saying. But here at Preserve A Life, you get a quality product that your loved ones can utilize here and now. There are no gimmicks or IOUs."

While Cunningham professes to want nothing to do with ALCOR, a well-placed source tells New Times that this claim may be all talk. The source says that the two firms are working on a deal in which Preserve A Life would offer humidermy, where only the skin is utilized, and the rest of the body could then be frozen over at ALCOR.

"What they're telling people is that a skinned body could just as easily be fixed in the future as anything else," the source says. "Jeez, ALCOR's convinced people that they can get their heads chopped off and that medical science might one day be able to clone a new body! Wouldn't it be easier for advanced medical science to clone a new coat of skin? If the two companies were to join forces, it would offer the deceased and their families a chance to have their cake and eat it, too."

The source continues, "What you have to realize is that what these two companies offer is not mutually exclusive."

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Comparisons to ALCOR, the Scottsdale cryogenics lab best known for turning late Red Sox slugger Ted Williams' head into a much-fought-over human Popsicle, is on the mark for a number of reasons.

City fathers struggled tirelessly to have ALCOR come to Scottsdale, and similarly Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and Governor Janet Napolitano teamed up to bring home the Preserve A Life bacon to Arizona's capital city.