Newsweek is literally doing play-by-play on the putrefacation of Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse. I can’t say I’m surprised, or especially perturbed.

The thing that bothers me is that one of my favorite authors gave such an uncharacteristically catty and hypocritical quote:

What’s your view of how this case has been handled?
There should have been a very quick decision by the judge as to embalming and as to where she should have been buried. Every so often I see a bit of this so-called hearing and I am embarrassed that people should engage in this public indignity and inhumanity. I think we are seeing the worst manifestations of our culture and at the time of death, the dead deserve the best manifestations of our humanity. What we have created is a media circus with no dignity whatsoever. This woman chose to have precious little dignity in her life, but the least we could do to a fellow human being is to have sufficient compassion to provide for her some dignity in death. [Emphasis added.]

Sherwin Nuland is professor of surgery who teaches bioethics at Yale as well as a prolific author books on medicine and the medical humanites. I highly recommend his book How We Die, which happens to be the publication that got him the Newsweek interview.

Nuland is one of my favorite writers, in part because his work evinces genuine compassion. I’m disappointed that he would take a swipe at any recently deceased person, especially while criticizing others’ disrespect in the same breath.