corpses

I spend most of my time around corpses. I wear a long sleeve shirt during dissection, the only one in my class, hoping that no one will figure out that I’m hiding scars. Whenever I scrub into surgery, I can feel eyes on my exposed wrist, see the nurses, senior docs and anybody else, looking at them, wondering, and I think, judging. I wonder whether a patient will trust me if they saw me in scrubs, whether somewhere down the line, a department chair would second guess me, if/when they knew/know that I tried to kill myself.

I can live with all that. I tried to kill myself because I hated myself, and I felt that life had no meaning. A dying child drove me to that conclusion, and I’ve never since been free of the conviction that nothing matters. I gave up my faith in God, and alienated my entire family in the process. I sacrificed all my personal relationships. I have no friends, and I’m exhausted. If I went to the mental health clinic, I’d see through every word they said to an underlying “strategy” (afterall, medical students get psych training), and I’d be able to manipulate them into saying whatever I want. They’d be no help. The bodies help.

Not in some perverse way. They are all that’s left, at least physically, of a person. For whatever reason, they chose to let us dissect their remains, and now I know them in a way no family member or friend, ever did. I’ve never heard their voices, but I’ve held their hearts, dug out their nerves. I’ve seen their scars, sternum’s wired shut, hematomas from the incessant poking of IVs, rods in the bones they fell on, bones that were weakened by cancers and the inexorable wear of time. THEY ARE ALONE in the lab. When I shut the box, when I strip my gloves and leave for the night, they stay, silent, waiting. I am also alone. But, sometimes, we are together, and then they tell me their stories. They tell me how that they died from a stroke, how their muscles atrophied, how they became so obese it takes some students hours to dig to muscle. I listen, and I am grateful they are there for me and my classmates, that they made this choice to help us help others.

But still, I sometime envy them. They know, you see, whatever there is to know, about the meaning of life. They know everything, if there is an everything, and nothing, if there is nothing. They feel no pain. All I know now is anatomy – the reasons why my attempts to end my life last year failed, the ways I could do it better next time. All I feel is disgusted with myself. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up early and go to class, then to dissection. The corpses won’t speak, but all the while I wonder, why did you bother? Why give to others, even after your passing? Are you still, even in death, hoping to achieve something worthwhile, something lasting?

I know they won’t answer, no matter how much I wish they could. Someday far in future, I’ll try to kill myself again, and this time I won’t fuck it up. I wonder what story my corpse would tell. I wonder whether they’d even dissect a body COVERED in scars. More importantly, I wonder what I’ll know then, and whether I’ll still be alone.