Dad's Last Wish

“The decision to donate his body makes us all proud and, three years later, I’m still just as proud today,” Kim Polries, Grand Forks, says about her father, Robert Miller who passed away Oct. 11, 2003, at age 69, from complications of diabetes.

A small-grains farmer near Heaton, ND, Miller was hospitalized many times in his final months and always took an interest in the UND medical students and residents-in-training who took care of him in the hospital where his daughter visited him daily.

“He loved having the students and residents come in,” she recalls.  “He’d say, ‘They have to learn somewhere...’

“Every one who came into the room, he’d have to ask them where they were from and other things... He was very much a ‘people person,’ he was curious about people, and so comfortable around the students.”            

Concerning his arrangements with the medical school’s Deeded Body Program, he had told his daughter, “‘If anything happens to me, here are my papers.  Just take me to the medical school,’” she remembers.

Because of that decision, “there wasn’t a lot of stress involved” in his passing, Polries says.  It “completely answered the questions of what Dad would want us to do at his death.”

She’s come to understand how important it is for a student to have “that opportunity to see how the body works and is put together, and how it functions,” she says.  It’s much better than “looking at things in a book.”

Throughout their association with the medical school, “as a family, we felt our loved one was very respected and very appreciated by the university,” she says.  They did “not look at these bodies as something disposable, but really that they are human beings.”              

That feeling was reaffirmed at the graveside ceremony in September 2005 when her father’s cremains were interred along with those of 14 other donors.

“Just the way they planned it, the way they handled it, it was very respectful, very dignified,” she says.  “I was just pleased with what I saw myself.  I thought it was very, very nice.”

-Pamela D. Knudson

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