Amputation frightens me just as much as the next person, but there is one component of losing an appendage that I think would be interesting to experience: the “phantom limb” sensation. The feeling that the arm or leg or other appendage is still present, still attached, still moving, long after it’s been dismembered. Some call it “stump hallucination” — which sounds sorta dirty to me — and also like some sort of psychedelic forest mushroom. The phrase “Phantom Limb” sounds so much better. It’s almost as cool as the name for an underground comic superhero or a punk band.

80% of all amputees report phantom limb sensation. I don’t mean to insult any of my differently-abled readers by pouring salt on old wounds with this topic, but I must say that in some ways you’ve got it lucky if you’re missing an arm and a leg yet still feel its presence. Because you can do whatever you want to with it and no one will be the wiser.

With a phantom arm, I’d pick my nose in public whenever it itched. I wouldn’t need to wipe it off. And that’s only the beginning. I’d flip off rude clerks and obnoxious co-workers, giving them the phantom finger while smiling and nodding to their faces. I’d shoplift behind my back while talking to the department store clerk. I’d freak out everybody in arm wrestling matches at the local saloon. And if I had a phantom leg, well, I’d kick people who deserved it like crazy.

I’m no perv, but I can’t promise that I wouldn’t be curious enough to give a few people a little phantom feel up, either. No hard feelings, right?

And, of course, it goes without saying that it would be EXTRA cool to shake phantom hands with a fellow amputee. We could high five when no one was looking or phantom thumb wrestle. Or even a fist fight. Anything goes with my amputated ghost buddies.

I’ve heard that the brain doesn’t die right away when the head is chopped off — and that some people’s final vision is their headless torsos. But I want to know: do decapitated people have phantom head? I’m not so sure two heads are better than one — wouldn’t that be kind of schizophrenic for awhile there?

I apologize for being so glib. Phantom limbs aren’t always as fun as I make them sound. There’s a serious condition known as “phantom limb pain” which is quite horrific. Image feeling like your hand had a nail driven through it — and no one could do anything about it, because it wasn’t really there, not physically anyway. Just that zinging, pain, dismembered yet attached, present yet not physical in a way that anyone could help you. People with this condition have been driven to suicide. (Probably twice: after slashing their phantom wrists doesn’t work).

Doctors haven’t quite figured out what causes sensation in missing body parts. Some say that phantom limb is wishful thinking — a phantasy so powerful it manifests itself as “real” in the patient’s brain. But this has been discredited — how many phantom bitch-slaps are you willing to take after claiming that 80% of all amputees are psychotic? Instead, most doctors see the nervous system as the cause. Some claim it’s related to the nerve endings in the stump, which “tingle” after the trauma and therefore create “stump hallucination” — a sensation which reaches ghost-like out of the stump and the brain, literally, “fills in the blanks.” Another explanation focuses on the brain itself, which has a hardwired map for controlling body parts, and continues to rely on this map even after the limb is gone. It’s sort of like using a map from 1982 to drive around modern day Russia. You’re bound to end up in Transylvania. This can also lead to some wire-crossing. Some phantom limb patients actually feel a tickle on their cheek when their phantom limb acts up. Others have even claimed to experience orgasms in their missing limbs! (See the “wishful thinking” theory above).

But maybe all this phantom limb business is not so scientific after all. Legend has it that Lord Nelson felt pain in his phantom limb — the sensation of fingers digging into the arm he lost after an attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife — and claimed that this was “direct evidence for the existence of the soul.” If an arm can “exist” after it’s been removed, why not the whole body after it has been destroyed? Sounds logical, right? But also frightening: I want to know who was digging their nails into his phantom sleeve. And I truly hope our souls aren’t really the same shape of our bodies, like some ghost out of a bad cartoon. I’d like to think my soul is much more amorphous and gelatinous than that. More like a floating jellyfish or something, stingers and all. You heard me right: I want to be a phantom Man o War, floating in the air you breathe!

But I digress. I have to say that, soul or not, I don’t really believe all that much in phantom limb. Because if it were true, all the other things that we’re separated from would still haunt us in very weird ways. We’d all still feel tethered to our mothers through phantom umbilical cords or surrounded by strange bags of phantom placentas. Mothers would feel phantom children curling in their wombs, growing larger and larger, all the way into their nineties. In fact, there would be phantom wombs for hysterectomy patients, not to mention the ghosts of an innumerable amount of surgical procedures: phantom tonsils, phantom biopsies, phantom wisdom teeth, phantom Siamese twins, phantom foreskin, phantom liposuction fat, and on and on and on. Not to mention phantom fingernails and beards and nose hair and all the other things we snip away day after day without a second thought.

How long is my phantom nose hair, anyway? And does this explain why I trip over my phantom feet for no apparent reason sometimes? If only I was a jellyfish, with my phantom pseudopods, I wouldn’t have these problems.

[Recommended reading (and source for some of the above, including that orgasm in the limb business): Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. (NY: William and Morrow, 1998). Much more information and pleasure reading at Dr. Ramachandran's home page ]

I’m considering burial at sea. And I don’t mean having my ashes scattered in the Hudson like so much pollution. I want to be tossed overboard like an unwelcome stowaway or dropped over a waterfall like, well, like a suicide, only I’d already be dead. What I’m saying is simple: I want to make a splash.

If I’m present in the body at all after death, I think it would be a much better way to go. I’d get to take a vacation of sorts, rather than be locked up in a Houdini box for eternity. I’d get to snorkel without the worries of all that nerdy snorkeling gear. And if I dissolved, well, that’s so much better than decomposition. My body would liquefy and my cells would spread across the world and even evaporate into the air. It’s so much better than land burial, where you sort of just rot in your casing, and — if you’re lucky — ooze through the coffin cracks into the soil, and — if you’re even luckier — eventually climb your way up through the tree roots toward the air. But if you are interred at sea, you might become a foul skin that floats on the water, like a tourist bobbing comfortably on one of those pool lounge chairs.

I mean, aren’t our bodies something like 98% water, anyway? We’re more like Michelob Ultra than the Guinness we think we are.

Oh, okay, I looked it up. It’s more like 60%. So Miller Genuine Draft, then.

But back to my point: Why feed the garden, when our ancestry of oceans and rivers and lakes awaits? Why do we bury the dead like a dog buries its bone? You might think it’s all about the stink, and you’d have a point. But submersion not only covers up the foul odor of death, but also saves you the sweaty armpits of the digging, so it’s twice as nose-friendly. Unless you’re hauling a particularly flabby body overboard. Then you might have sweat and, well, gas, to deal with. But contrary to the belief that fat floats, weight sinks, and water swallows the stink.

Would you bury the dead in mud to honor them? Do you always lock the people you respect most up in a box without any food or deodorant and toss them in a filthy hole? I don’t want to be replaced with a symbolic chunk of stone. Even if you made a statue out of me, you’d be talking about, essentially, a concrete doll, and I’d much rather be an action figure with kung-fu grip. But seriously: if we really wanted to memorialize the dead with statues and stones, why not invent some sort of embalming fluid that actually petrified the corpse, so we could keep it in our living rooms or barbecue pits for posterity? Why don’t we start mummifying ourselves in high tech ways? I’d much rather be dipped in high gloss resin. Of course, the problem then would be my never-changing fashion statement. Unless a family member played dress-up with my cadaver in the same ritual fashion as others renew graveyard flowers. Out of love and respect.

And yet even if my dream of corpse resin never comes true, I’d still rather dissolve than be perpetually frozen in time, trapped behind a veil of plastic, watching the world change around me as seasons come and go, without ever being able to say “I told you so.”

Now, I know there are other options. But cremation just isn’t as creamy as it sounds. And I could donate my body to science, but I wouldn’t be able to write it off on my 1040 the next year, no matter how inevitable death and taxes are supposed to be.

So water it is.* I will dissolve myself of this world. Water is as quick-actin’ as Tinactin. And it prevents dead foot fungus just as well, too.

There’s no easier method to return from the dead, either. Nothing recycles like water. Look in your drink and tell me I’m wrong.

* Disclaimer: Don’t hold me to this, Mr. Lawyer. I’m still waiting for my patent on that body resin idea to come through. And as far as burial goes, well, to be honest, it really all depends upon the real estate, doesn’t it?