The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [104]
Later that same day, I started a diary. I had not kept one in well over twenty years and, unlike the diaries of my youth, this was meant to be just-the-facts. I simply wanted to get details of dissections and snatches of dialogue down on paper each night while they were fresh in my mind—an aide-mémoire for the writing of this book. It was not long, though, before I began including personal reflections. On October 10, 2004, for instance, I confided to myself:
I have to be honest. It’s not just the body I’m fascinated by but also death. The snuffed-out, no-second-chances finality of it. The randomness of it. The nearness of it.
Death has always seemed near to me. Even as a little kid, dying didn’t seem eighty or a hundred years away—impossible to conceive. But instead, as if it could be close. Not that it would be, but could be.
I still think about death all the time. I keep expecting it. Not my own, necessarily, but someone’s…. I can feel it getting nearer and nearer, now and then even brushing up against me. Lying awake in bed, sometimes I feel it pressing against my body.
Two years later to the day, at eight in the morning on October 10, 2006, Steve died in bed beside me. Though he was extremely fit and in excellent health overall, apparently a freak episode of cardiac arrhythmia led to respiratory arrest and, ultimately, cardiac arrest. I woke to the terrible sound and sight of Steve struggling desperately to breathe. Even more terrifying was the complete silence that soon followed, his body motionless. I started CPR, paramedics came, and we got him to the ER, but they were never able to get a heartbeat. Steve was forty-three years old.
WE HAD BEEN together for sixteen years. Steve was my partner not only in life but in writing, especially on this book—the Carter to my Gray, as I would affectionately say. (“No, make that the Gray to your Carter,” he would tease in return.) After his death, going back and completing the final draft of the book seemed daunting. I wasn’t sure if I could do it without him.
Though Steve never set foot in the anatomy lab, I even sensed his absence at Epilogue that morning. He used to drop me off before every class and pick me up after every lab and listen to my daily debriefings on the ride home. After the Epilogue class, I would have told him how I’d seen Dana and Kim and Dhillon and Charlie; how Sexton had retired, Anne had been promoted, and Andy had taken a new job; how all the med students were unfamiliar to me (Meri and Kolja and the others I’d studied with were already in their third year); and how, just as in the past, I was repeatedly mistaken by the students for a TA. When I told them I was writing a book about Gray’s Anatomy, most students assumed I was talking about the TV show. “Yep, that’s right,” I’d say teasingly, “I’m telling the true story of Meredith Grey and Dr. McDreamy.”
Finally, I would have told Steve that I’d been nervous to see the bodies, afraid that they might stir up upsetting memories of his death. By the way, I think that is one of the strangest things about losing a longtime partner: the very person you most want to talk to about your loss is the person who is gone. Well, it doesn’t always stop me; sometimes I talk to Steve anyway.
“Honey-pie, you would’ve been proud of me,” I told him as I drove myself home from UCSF. “Before class got started, I just took a deep breath and marched over to one of the tables and unzipped a body bag.” The cadaver looked like a cadaver, I told him, and nothing at all like you. I laughed aloud, unsure how that had come out. “Well, you know what I mean,” I said, and I was sure he did.
“It was like when I brought your ashes home,” I continued.