Sunday, September 6, 2009

Dead Burying Dead

I see dead people now. I'm a first-year medical student studying human anatomy and nearly every weekday I study structures in the carcasses of people who chose to donate their deceased bodies to our medical school. We students, of course, study these dead to ready ourselves to study the living. I suppose in some ways the experience is quite special in that these persons have allowed me to see the parts of their bodies in ways no other person has.

Quite a strange feeling, to be confronted with the mortality of my species on a daily basis. I wonder if, out of respect for the dead, I have purposely chosen to let it bother me. It's as though my heart were questioning, "If I forget I am dealing with the physical half, do I deny the existence of the other half, diminishing that person's existence?"

I ask many questions now -- the experience shakes them out of me. What were they thinking as they approached death? I wonder if they gave their bodies out of fear ... fear of dying without having done something selfless with their lives, or fear of God, or fear that their loved ones won't be able to afford the cost of burial. I look at the limbs of my own body now, knowing their machinery and functions, but I wonder if these arms are part of "me" -- would I lose a part of "me" were I to lose an arm? ... or how much can be taken from my body and it still be "me"? If my organs were donated to others after my death, would part of "me" still be alive? (I don't think so.) Were I brain-dead but my body on life-support, would I still "be there"? (I kind of think I would be.)

One other concern is Death overriding my joy in life. Will I be always thinking about my own death and the death of friends? I think it would be easy for a person like me to lose the "joy of living", unless of course, that person had an 8-year-old starting football (which I happen to have). It is my new-found therapy to watch my 8-year-old practice football. I think we anatomy students need reminders about what life means to counteract the meditation on death.