Cadavers in Grief
Haruna Choijilsuren
I had always heard about cadavers being the basis for anatomy lab.
I had seen the bodies of loved ones in the past, but I wasn’t close to them and I was young,
That version of me thought I knew death.
But then, it was my grandfather—
Whose back I used to scratch
Whose belly I used to listen to
Whose hands guided me and hugged me and reassured me
Whose shins filled with scars as I helped change his bandages
Whose feet I helped put socks onto
Whose ears I cleaned
Whose head I scratched
Whose eyebrows and face I used to trace as a toddler
And suddenly, there is a cadaver in front of me.
I spend hours learning about them intimately…
The muscle fibers, the nails, the skin, the fat that protected their organs
The fibroids in their uterus
The calcifications in their aorta
I piece together a story of their life
But one that will never be full, not in the same way
And I am grateful to learn from them, to understand their medical history
But once upon a time, someone else knew what their hands felt like.
How it was to be embraced lovingly by them
How their eyes twinkled with mischief
How they burst out laughing playing games
How they walked with a limp
How they dozed off after a meal
How their voice sounded
How it was to love them and
How it was to be loved by them
I hope their loved ones don’t grapple with the thoughts of medical students taking apart their loved ones piece by piece
I hope they are shielded from every sensation, every moment of anatomy lab
I hope they never have to think about the slow disintegration of their loved one
The way I did.
I can tell you every way that the heart can fail, how the lungs stop working, the breakdown of cells membranes with hypoxia,
What protein channels stop working and the irreversible pathways of cell death,
And what cells look like as they die one by one or all at once.
I can tell you all the ways the brain is damaged, how the body lives on in a coma, how the liver floods with enzymes,
What proteins flood the bloodstream as they try to save the body one last time,
And how our organs shut down one by one or all at once.
But I cannot tell you what death is. I cannot tell you how death occurs. I cannot explain to you what that means at all.
Haruna Choijilsuren is a second year MD/PhD student at UMass Chan Medical School and a graduate of the Medicine, Science, and Humanities department from the Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in narratives in medicine and the human experience.
