This is the back story. I’m Scottish, which means that I am a bit frugal when it comes to money. This is especially true since I have successfully danced with death twice. However, I can’t hope that I will have a handful of decades left. Nevertheless, my clock is still ticking. Sometime, my time will run out. I don’t want my children to waste the money on a funeral, casket, and a plot containing my mortal remains. Therefore, I have filled out papers to donate my remains to the University of Chicago. I am doing this well in advance of another dance so that there won’t be any questions when I cannot lead death as we dance.

Additionally, the U of C dealt successfully with treating one of my dances. I had prostate cancer, which was robotically removed by way of da Vinci Surgical System. However, the cancer had gotten outside the prostate. When it reemerged, I returned to the U of C and took hormone therapy for two months and then took two months of radiation while continuing the hormone treatments. I’ve been cancer free for over six years.

Since the medical teams at the U of C saved my life, I owe them something. I believe allowing them to use my remains for research and study is a means to repay them for the years that were added to my life by the U of C doctors.

That is the backstory. However, unrelated to donating my body to science, I was doing some research regarding some Chinese dynasties and happened upon a Chinese funeral custom dating back more than two millennia. If you had the money in ancient China, which would mean you were the emperor and/or his family, and you danced with death and died, you could be buried in a jade suit. This tradition occurred over 2100 years ago.

This is the funeral suit of Empress Princess Dou Wan of the Western Han dynasty. Her jade burial suit contained 2,500 pieces of jade laced together with over two pounds of gold wire. Her husband, Emperor Liu Sheng, was also buried in a jade suit.

The jade suit of Princess Dou Wan

This is Zhao Mo suit.

I’m reconsidering donating my body to the U of C. I am pondering being embalmed in a jade suit. My problem is that it would take a long time to make a funeral outfit for me. It took a jade master craftsman a decade of work to create a jade-tailor made suit during the Han dynasty.

Remember, I am Scottish. Imagine the cost to acquire either a new jade suit or an ancient one from some museum in China. I don’t wish to spend thousands of dollars as in $10-15,000 minimally for a funereal outfit. Additionally, I would like to have a suit in blue and yellow jade with gold threads lacing all the jade together. That could be a very costly bill for a Scottish person to fork out.

Therefore, I am suggesting to any of my readers who have several thousand dollars just laying around doing nothing but collecting dust, to donate it to me. You can attach new $100 bills to an email to me. This is my email address: campbell@wolverton-mountain.com. If you are very generous by attaching 10 to an email, I will mention you in future essays and have my Chinese jade craftsman write in Mandarin Chinese your name as a donor.

If you have more money sitting around and attach it to an email to me, I will make a meal at my place for you of Genghis Khan’s Mongolian steak tartar dinner. For dessert, I will present to you my masterpiece, bananas flambé.

If some of my readers will share their wealth with me so that I can get my jade suit, I will be able to know that after my last dance that my family can roll me up into my jade suit and....

If you might be interested in giving your body to a research hospital, contact

The Last Lecture

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Dancing with Death

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My Hauntings

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09/22/17