((c)iStockphoto.com)

The process of being prepared for the grave is fairly ghastly business: There’s the removal of blood and most of the organs, incisions and sewing with thick thread and lots and lots of make up. In the U.S., after the funeral and procession, it’s off to the graveyard or the crematorium, depending on one’s tastes and religion. Somewhere along the way, if you’ve been the fortunate recipient of a pacemaker, it too is removed — and taken out of circulation, either being thrown away or put into storage.

It was only the middle of the last century that we learned how to keep a clinically dead person alive and, most importantly, to remove and reuse the organs and tissues of those people. Astoundingly pacemakers have gone largely unnoticed as a corollary to this marriage of technology and reuse. We have decided we’re cool with reusing the hearts of other people, but we’re throwing away perfectly good pacemakers. Meanwhile, those great unseen, poverty-stricken masses around other parts of the globe could use them and are, ironically, dying in need of the very ones that we’re throwing away after removing them from our own dead people, despite their usefulness.

At this point some people, specifically a pair of University of Michigan cardiologists, have decided to look into how and if we can reuse those perfectly functioning pacemakers that are no longer keeping comparatively wealthy Westerners alive and put them in the chest cavities of people elsewhere who will be quite happy to receive them and stay alive because of them. What they’ve found is quite promising.

The U of M researchers are establishing a pilot system that other hospitals and universities can follow where local funeral homes, with the family’s consent, can remove and send the deceased’s pacemaker in for an assessment of how long the device’s battery will last. If it has 70 percent or more of its original life left, it is sanitized to reduce the chance of infection, its programming memory wiped clean and sent to other hospitals that enroll as recipient institutions.

The pilot program will likely take off, since it’s, you know, something we should have already been doing as a society. The U of M cardiologists surveyed patients with pacemakers at the university hospital and found that 84 percent said they would donate their pacemaker and funeral directors, 89 percent of whom said they’d be happy to pass them along to Michigan’s hospital program.

Let’s not forget the 1 to 2 million people who die around the world each year in need of a pacemaker. One would imagine the percentage of them who would respond that they would accept a free pacemaker from a dead guy in Michigan would be quite high.

Want to donate? Go to www.myheartyourheart.org.