"The caves, the caves...is there resistance to the caves? Or are you willing to go in?" We're heading into the viscera today, he declares. Some, including myself, are eager. Others are hesitant. We're continuing to dig in a grave, and the guts are typically where we get a clearer picture of death. In other words, the cause of death isn't typically apparent in the layers we've seen thus far. It's in the enlarged, discolored, tumored, displaced, adhered, bubbled, fibrotic lungs and livers and spleens and colons and mesenteries and other such entities that may be awaiting our eyes.
With cadavers supine, we tidy up and clear out the remaining musculature and break into joint capsules to disarticulate the clavicles from the sternum, and then I scrape my scalpel along the backside and inside of the costal margin, cutting through the double layer of the pleura to allow the diaphragm to settle away from the anterior ribcage, creating a narrow window into the thoracic cavity. The fibers of the diaphragm, now visible, are clearly running perpendicular to--and in the same plane as--the fibers of transversus abdominus, with edges of those two muscles basketweaving into one another. I slide my entire hand into the cavity in the horizontal plane, palming the diaphragm, which itself is palming the liver. And then I slide in on the frontal plane, the back of my fingers grazing the ribs, my fingerpads and palms touching the viscera. I'm speechless, extending my fingertips as far as the neck, seeing the movement of my own hand through the fleshy intercostals. My hand is literally on her heart and lungs, still beneath the birdcage of the ribs, and I'm in awe. I'm also in mild panic for a second, realizing I could potentially get stuck where I've wedged myself in, but then I realize there's nothing to be scared of here. Nothing to be scared of.
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| adore, Tom Bedel, anatomical collage art |
We come back from lunch, and I grab the garden clippers to snip, snip, snip up the lateral ribcage so we can reflect Rose's breastplate. The sound and the feel of the soft crunching between the blades is enough to make hair stand on end and eyes focus in, and soon the armor is off in one beautiful butterfly of bone and fiber and flesh. Speechless. Her lungs feel fairly dense and a little crackley, and upon palpation Gil speculates that they'd become not just fluid-filled, as is common with pneumonia at the end of life, but also fibrotic, which wouldn't exactly make it easy to breathe.
There's lots of talk of lungs, these trees of the heart, and 12 distinct pairs of lungs to behold. I feel the linebacker's and they're like pillowy clouds. Another man's are blackened clear through. One woman's are riddled with tumors. I can't help but think of my own lungs and my own breath, wondering if there are adhesions in the pleura, wondering if fibrosis has developed in hidden places after 35 years of struggling to breathe. I wonder, but I'm not afraid, and I can't tell if the absence of fear is authentic or a result of compartmentalizing the task at hand from my fear of suffering, which perhaps is neatly tucked away in its own little box at the moment. The fact that I'm not sure makes me pretty clear it's the latter.
We learn from the paperwork that Rose was 81, and that she died from respiratory failure. "That doesn't really tell us a lot. So, she died because she stopped breathing," implying that, well, that's why we all die, isn't it? At the table with 97-year-old Sakura, the little cherry blossom much smaller than myself, her lungs are soft, her liver and spleen are appropriately sized, and her intestines look fluid and happy. "Cause of death?" Gil queries. "Tired of birthday parties."
It's been a full day. Again. I only scratch the surface as I write here, content to not attempt the impossible task of recounting every minute, though the minutes today were some of the most memorable so far. But in a way this actual experience is just scratching the surface for me. It's an undoing that's waiting until I'm long gone from California to fully develop and to root. That's my gut sense, at any rate. Just like bodywork, the "work" continues (or sometimes just begins) after the client is long gone from the table. I don't see why that would be any different with Rose, and soon she'll leave our table with no trace. It's impossible for me to see that as an end, even if it will mean the end of the course. What it will begin, I have no idea.
