People from all walks of life - teachers, doctors and even homemakers - want something positive to come from their death.
Through UNM's Anatomy Donation Program, New Mexicans are ensuring that happens, by helping future doctors learn the intricacies of the human body.
The program, funded by the University's School of Medicine, welcomes between 60 and 70 recently deceased participants a year into the program, to be used by every medical student and doctor at UNM.
The ability to work with actual human bodies is more than an invaluable educational tool, said Tom Estenson, director of the program. It is a taste of reality, a way for the student to begin to think about death and dying, often for the first time.
"These people had families and lives, just like them," he said. "The first step in becoming a doctor is accepting that death is a part of life."
Medical students learn about every facet of the human body during a mandatory 10-week anatomy class in their first year. However, Estenson said all medical students, including occupational and physical therapy students, as well as doctors and surgeons, constantly rely on the cadavers to sharpen their skills or practice new surgical techniques.
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With more than 4,000 people on the list to donate their bodies, many of the participants have had medical problems during their lives, giving students a deeper understanding of the need to discover cures for the many diseases that plague humans, Estenson said.
He said, though, people opt to join the program for a number of reasons, all of which result in medical students being better prepared when they enter the real world.
"It is impossible to understand the human body without actually working with it," Estenson said. "The education they provide can't be replaced. There is no video or textbook that can compare."
Most people who donate their bodies to the program are between 60 and 90 when they die, most from relatively natural causes, including cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The average stay for the bodies at UNM is 14 months, after which they are cremated and returned to their families.
Estenson said the students learn everything "from A-Z" about the functioning of the human body through the cadavers, from specific organs' position in the body to how to detect disease.
Ron Andrews, director of UNM's Physical Therapy program, said his students benefit from working with the cadavers by learning the muscular and skeletal structures of the human body.
"The service these people are providing are critical to medical students and go on to benefit so many people in so many ways," he said.
UNM's medical students also understand the sacrifice the donors have made and the importance they play in medical education.
LaDonna Malone, a first-year medical student, said the expertise she will gain by working with the bodies is invaluable and she understands that she is lucky to have had someone give such a selfless gift to her and her classmates.
"We get the opportunity to see firsthand how the body is supposed to look and feel," she said.
Estenson said there are no better teachers for medical students than the donors, whose bodies hold information critical for the future of medicine.
"Most of these people lived for eight or nine decades," he said. "We can all learn from them."
