Unlike colleges, the Body Farm isn’t looking for specific qualities in its applicants. “We can’t control when donors pass away and come to us, so it’s not practical to look for donors who fit a certain demographic,” Dr. Steadman pointed out. Instead, when donors arrive, about 100 times a year, they’re matched to current projects. Also unlike colleges, the Body Farm doesn’t encourage visits. It’s closed to the public, surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire and hung with signs that are deliberately ambiguous about what lies within. That is mostly meant to keep gawkers and pranksters away, but it also helps ensure that a donor’s family member doesn’t catch a distressing glimpse of their loved one’s progress from corpse to skeleton — like puberty, an awkward, unattractive transition most people would prefer not to be remembered by.

Nonetheless, I’ve managed to glean a notion of what lies beyond the fence, because the Body Farm’s donor paperwork also includes a photography release. That’s how Ms. Mann came to shoot there, how National Geographic filmed a documentary there, and how you can look up news videos showing jawless skulls resting artfully on foliage as a voice-over explains how detectives investigate murders.

You can even watch an episode of the 2008 BBC documentary “Stephen Fry in America,” in which the actor and author tours the facility and flinches at the smell of a body folded into a trash bin. Yet minutes later, equilibrium restored, he declares the Body Farm a fundamentally optimistic place because it’s used “for extraordinarily good purposes.” He might like to leave his own body to the Body Farm, Mr. Fry concludes, as a way to do more good in death than he did in life.

So far, 1,800 people who shared that sentiment have ended up there; another 4,000, including me, have arranged to join them eventually. It’s a comforting thought — not because I’m in any hurry, but because I like knowing what to expect. Barring certain highly infectious diseases or an accident from which I can’t be recovered, my post-mortem destination is booked.

When it’s time for me to head to Knoxville, I’ve instructed my loved ones to dress me in a favorite T-shirt quoting a Frank Turner song: “Not Dead Yet.” I don’t have a spouse or children to object, and I hope that will amuse the Body Farm’s staff members as they match me to my paperwork, confirm that I have no preferences about my disposition (some donors specify that they want to be placed face up, or clothed, or not in water), and cart me out to wherever they need me to be.

In the first part of my afterlife, my most frequent visitors will be beasts, birds and bugs. The only humans to see me will be students and researchers. If I’m exposed to the elements in the heat of summer, this stage could take a few months; if I become part of a longer experiment, like one measuring and identifying the gases a buried body emits over time, I might be “in the field” for years.

Still, after an average of six months to two years, I’ll be reduced to bones. At that point, my remains will move indoors to the W.M. Bass Donated Skeletal Collection, a permanent, curated collection representing a cross-section of Americans of many ages, ethnicities and walks of life.