Today I left Lydia in the competent hands of my colleagues and moved to another cadaver. I felt a little unsure about leaving her behind, but promised to let the new donor inspire in me all the respect and reverence that Lydia had. No name has come to me clearly yet. This new woman is taller and fleshier than Lydia, and she has large brown freckles on her arms. She was 90 when she died. Working with her today I thought about the woman who came to the Community Health Center yesterday to see Pat. She was 78 years old, calm and sharp, a snowshoer, a flautist, whose husband died six months ago. In anatomy lab, I looked into the chest cavity of my new donor and tears fell down my face as I looked at her lungs and heart. My classmates asked if I needed to leave, but I wanted to stay. I remember reading how some medical students have felt like there is no room for emotions in human anatomy lab, like they aren't welcome. I haven't felt like that so much, and I thought, for me it makes sense that this would make me cry and it's no reason to leave the room. Then, to my surprise, our professor handed me a scalpel and I, still crying, removed some beautiful seaweed like fat from around her heart and lungs.
What was it about today? My body stood next to her body, with its heart beating and its chest expanding and retracting, bringing air into the lungs so I can do what I do, heart pumping oxygen to my brain so I can think, heart circulating hormones in my bloodstream so I can have these wild emotional experiences, so I can soak cloth with blood, so I can cry with a scalpel in my hand. Her body lay in repose next to mine, having put aside the undulations of living, having chosen to postpone her composting so I could learn from her. Ten or fifteen minutes after I removed her right lung with its horizontal and oblique fissures, felt the impressions made in it by the esophagus and the spinal cord, examined the primary bronchus, pulmonary artery and vein, I was reading our lab manual out loud so we would know what to do next. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, a wave of nausea rose up from my abdomen, making my jaw feel tingly and my head spin. What was happening? Was my body revolting against death? Saying, "We are in a room full of death, but we are alive! We should get out of here and live! How did we get here? Was it something we ate? Have we eaten the pomegranate seeds of Death? Maybe we should throw up everything we've eaten to make sure we can still Live." Was it menstruation, turning up the volume to eleven on everything I feel? Like how when I'm bleeding I get so tired I feel like a truck full of tired hit me on the highway, or how I get so hungry I feel sick with sharp discomfort? Or was I dipping my toes into the fetid cesspool of death, understanding physically that it isn't necessarily comfortable or dignified, that it will make me shit all over myself and clench my fists with terror, that I may not be ready but it will happen anyway. There is a little bit of death in every cycle, the darkness in the sky before the new moon. Every release of the built up uterine lining is a chance to feel your death around you. This is not because you missed a chance to have a baby, its because the menstrual cycle is a life cycle in and of itself. This is one of the greatest gifts given to a menstruating human being, this chance to get to know death little by little. Day to day, I am walking on a mountain pass with a beautiful but frighteningly steep slope just to the side of the trail. When I have my period, I take a few days to stand at the edge of the slope and look out, thinking to myself, "I am not ready to fall. I need to just stick to the trail." But then today as I stood at the edge and contemplated falling, a rock shifted beneath my feet and made it all more real to me. When I found my footing again I stepped back a little bit, but its not time yet to keep walking. I'm just going to sit here for another few days and keep thinking about it.