The towel felt heavy the first time I lifted it,
\nWeighed down,
\nSoaked.<\/p>\n
I held in my breath while we grabbed the ends of the white damp cloth and peeled it back,
\nIn part from the acrid smell of formaldehyde,
\nAnd in part because of,
\nThe fear.<\/p>\n
Its chin was jutting upwards to the ceiling,
\nThe black buds of a sloppy row of stitches closed the deep fissure running along the clavicle and towards the midline.
\nThis was where the blood was drained.<\/p>\n
I braced myself,
\nThe cold iron table sucked the life through my hands and from my body as I braced myself on the dissection table.
\nAnd then I saw it.<\/p>\n
I felt nothing.
\nJust a floating,
\nLightheaded feeling,
\nAs I begun the ascent,
\nLevitating into the ethereal space that fills the gap between the world of the living and the world of,
\nThe dead.<\/p>\n
Like purgatory,
\nI was completely still.
\nMotionless.
\nDissected from reality.
\nCutting away,
\nJust naming\u2014
\nThe structures.<\/p>\n
Then later,
\nThe day was done.
\nWe coated it with formaldehyde through a spray-bottle.
\nLike gardeners tending a plot,
\nAs though the skin we just eviscerated would sprout back.
\nAnd then we covered it with the white towel and hosed that down too.<\/p>\n
My foot was poised on the step-lever to hoist down the dissection table,
\nBut I was disturbed.
\nThere was the white towel in front of me.
\nWhat was underneath it?
\nHer body outlined a humanoid shape along the matted towel.
\nShe was someone that was loved, and had loved.
\nWhere was the gash where she bled?
\nShe was someone\u2019s daughter.
\nI could not dissociate dead from alive anymore.
\nThe idea of what was underneath,
\nThe idea of life,
\nI had touched a ghost.<\/p>\n
The thin white veneer that wrapped the outside of her body,
\nIt was a canvas.
\nUpon which you paint an image of an offshore breezy fishing town.
\nShe lived there for a while, I\u2019d like to think.
\nIn that little idyllic village off the coast.
\nWith her husband,
\nA hardworking man with a stout jaw,
\nA stern and powerful jaw.
\nHe was an Irishman by blood,
\nAnd made a living off the boats.
\nOften he was away from home but he always brought her back a handful of daffodils on his way from the marina.<\/p>\n
There wasn\u2019t much pollution there,
\nIf any it was from the tugboats wrangling along unwelcome fishing seiners.
\nThis was evidenced by the lack of carbon pigment deposition on the lung tissue,
\nSeen on gross dissection and histological analysis.<\/p>\n
The years weighed on and on like lead,
\nThe grief of the love that passed on and along the waves more days than not.
\nNo longer did love linger lightly on her like the tiara of trillium I always imagined she wore on her wedding day.
\nSo her back bent and broke under the load of grief.
\nSpecifically,
\nAnterior T12-L1 compression fractures secondary to osteomalacia,
\nEvidenced by post-mortem CT imaging.<\/p>\n
When her neighbors asked when her old man would be back,
\nAnd joked of a love affair with a mermaid.
\nHer back started hurting again.
\nTears welled in her eyes.
\nAnd the lump in her throat made it so hard to\u2014
\nSpeak.
\nThat one we excised out.
\nThe lump.
\nIt was a thyroglossal duct cyst.
\nCharacterized by the presence of parafollicular cells seen on an H+E stained tissue sample.<\/p>\n
Through the many years she was still a good woman to him.
\nThough he died one day,
\nThe way that things usually die.
\nNaturally.
\nAccording the literature women live longer than men.
\nApproximately by an average of 5 years.
\nShe lived.<\/p>\n
I had to slip underneath her right arm to cut open her neck,
\nIn her icy embrace I swore I heard her speak to me in that moment.
\nAfter,
\nWe had cleared the cobwebs from her throat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The towel felt heavy the first time I lifted it, Weighed down, Soaked. I held in my breath while we grabbed the ends of the white damp cloth and peeled it back, In part from the acrid smell of formaldehyde, And in part because of, The fear. Its chin was jutting upwards to the ceiling, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,11],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}