The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [105]
You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Officially, Steve was declared dead at the hospital. Declared dead—what a strange phrase. That makes it sound like an announcement was made over a loudspeaker. In fact, it was more like an unspoken exchange between the attending physician and myself. He left his position at the head of the gurney and approached me at the other end, where I was cradling Steve’s feet. The doctor’s pained expression told me everything I needed to know. I nodded, and practically in a whisper, he gave directions to his team. The medic, by now drenched in sweat, stopped CPR. A nurse shut off the respirator. And with that, everyone in the room quietly filed out and left me alone with Steve. Less than an hour after I’d awakened, I found myself performing a last rite, sacred in its intimacy: shutting Steve’s eyes entirely closed with my fingers. I removed his rings, put them on, and said what he had not been able to say to me: Goodbye.
Nothing I’d learned in anatomy class prepared me for that moment. Nothing. Even being able to understand precisely what had happened to Steve anatomically and physiologically—I was easily able to read and interpret his autopsy report, for example—did not make it any easier to bear or grasp the fact that he was so suddenly gone. Which I see now as the painful final lesson of my education in anatomy. True, in a literal sense, I had never been nearer to death than in the lab itself. Over the course of a year, the result of a journey that began with Henry Gray and H. V. Carter and their book, I touched and felt and dissected dead bodies with my own hands and was constantly surrounded by dozens of them, to the point that I became inured to the sight. I gained a keen understanding of the fabric of the body—the raw, organic nature of flesh and bone and blood. But you don’t learn about death from dead bodies. Just as you learn about the body by dissecting one, you learn about death by experiencing a death, by losing someone you love.
Conversely, what you learn about in Gross Anatomy is life, human life, clichéd as that may sound. In one of the last dissections I performed, I remember, I anatomized the knee, shoulder, and elbow joints, in effect dissecting the mechanics of human movement. And what is life—or, a defining sign of life—but movement? Whether the blinking of an eye or the wiggling of fingers or, with arms and legs pumping and lungs heaving, the running toward something in a great burst of speed—toward a goal, toward a finish line, flat out to the very end.
THE END.
Appendix
HENRY GRAY
1827–61
Gray’s final resting place is London’s High-gate Cemetery, where he shares the same grave as his mother, Ann, who died five years after him. Gray’s Anatomy, now in its thirty-ninth edition in England and thirty-seventh in the United States, has never gone out of print and has sold an estimated five million copies to date. The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of Gray’s Anatomy.
HENRY BARLOW CARTER
1803–68
The patriarch of the Carter family, artist Henry Barlow Carter, died of bronchitis on October 4, 1868, at age sixty-five. As described in his obituary, Henry Sr. sounds very much like his eldest son: “There was a natural reserve about him that rather prevented an extensive friendship, but those admitted into that circle were often charmed with the geniality of his spirit and the originality of his ideas.”
JOSEPH NEWINGTON CARTER
1835–71
In 1859, H.V.’s free-spirited younger brother began teaching art and, along with sister Lily, converted to Christianity. “She and Joe walk as fellow Christians,” a happy H.V. wrote at the time. In May 1871, Joe, a working artist, married longtime love Elisabeth Smith Newham, who was widowed three months later. Joe died of double pneumonia at their Scarborough home on August 16, 1871.
ELIZA HARRIET