14. Unfixed (Part II)

Following my second unfixed lab, I decide on a preference for the embalmed donor. The vibrancy of a recently donated body is so interesting and constantly changing, it feels like a race against time to move through the dissection. 

“Ben” (for benevolent gift), who died at ninety-seven of prostate cancer and dementia, was one of three donors in my final unfixed lab. The other two were also in their nineties and died of dementia—unfortunately, because their brains are not embalmed, by the time we open their skulls, the opportunity to view them for visual comparison is lost. There are also three hip replacements among them, each repaired using a different technique. 

This particular lab is triggering for me on a new level. There are details in my personal life I haven’t yet associated with the challenges of this dissection. One of my eyes has been twitching on and off for nearly a year. Unaware of what exactly to pin the stress on, I figure I’ve been working too much and very much need the time away that the lab (sort of) provides. 

Earlier in the year, I find myself googling my father. As expected, all my search turns up is the realization of an internal ache to learn more about him. I don’t know who to turn to for those answers since my mother and I no longer speak. I had asked her in a letter, many years earlier, to share what she could, and the request went unfulfilled. He had a sister I became estranged from decades ago, after a rift between my mother and my dad’s side of the family. I don’t have the courage yet to reach out to her. 

While I’m keying my way through the Internet in hopes of uncovering something, I receive a Facebook friend request from old family friends, husband and wife. It sends a rush of panic through me as I consider the implications of opening a door connected to my mother. I allow the request to hang as I process what’s at stake. I’m searching for information on my history, and my search, although unfruitful, has been timed impeccably with this invitation. It’s too much of a coincidence, and I am terrified. It takes me only an hour to comb over the possibility of it being an attempt to repair things between my mother and me, and I know without a doubt that although I am curious about having a normal relationship with her, I’m not ready to risk being vulnerable again to her rejection. Our physical association ended years ago, but all the emotion of our dysfunctional relationship still exists. It’s going to take more work on my part to reconcile the ways in which our genetic bond connects us. Too many years and experiences have passed for me, and I’m not willing to revert to being a child in that relationship again. Now is not the time to reconcile. 

I feel empowered by this realization and accept the request. I am immediately rewarded by pictures of my dad and me from my childhood. I can barely access the emotion the gesture stirs. I feel oddly cared for and acknowledged for existing. For so long, I have felt rejected by everyone associated with my mother, and the renewed connection breathes new life into some long-forgotten, atrophied spaces in my heart. 

The couple live in the town where my father is buried. I’m nervous to ask, but I want to combine a trip to my dad’s hometown with our reunion, where I will have an opportunity to ask questions and fill in some blanks. 

I’m full of emotion, uncertainty, and anticipation for all the potential my life holds at the moment I enter the lab. I’m not as grounded as I’d like to believe. 

Five days before my departure for the dissection, my accommodations fall through. We are staying in New Jersey, and I am a ball of stress as I try to find three others to share the only decent rental property I can find online. As I text back and forth with Carla, my original roommate for the trip, she responds, “Calm the fuck down, Chris!” 

I am jolted back to the present, with a realization that maybe I’m moving too fast, juggling too many balls. 

I’m happy to arrive a day early, even though it means spending a night alone in a hotel before our Airbnb is ready. I’m not as familiar with this city and lab, having only attended once before. I do a lot of research on what to see as I pass the time. On the itinerary is a cemetery in Brooklyn that is nearly two hundred years old and covers over 450 acres. My hike through the grounds is quiet, winding, and sheltered by a canopy of great old trees with fat trunks of deeply textured bark. I locate a macabre display in a small library that depicts taxidermy mice donning lab coats, gloves, and masks to dissect a Barbie doll on a miniature stainless-steel autopsy humidor. The day finishes at a museum where wax sculptures showcase life-size displays of anatomy, pathology, and rare body variances that were touring attractions in the circuses in the late 1800s. I overhear a man inspecting the genitals of a hermaphrodite exclaim, “I did not need to come here! Seriously, guys, I did not need to see this!” 

I chuckle at my own unorthodox sense of adventure that led me on this daylong crusade of weird anatomy and images of death. 

That morning, by email, I found out that the lab I am about to attend has been delayed and therefore shortened by a day. One of our donors has died so recently that their bloodwork has not yet been completed to ensure our safety. It’s a situation that has not presented before and highlights for me the gift of body donation. Our lab is also the morgue in this facility, and I wonder, is it possible that in a morgue fridge with a capacity of two hundred, there are so few who have donated? 

Our first day in the non-lab tugs at my impatience and need for rest. Gil is lecturing and using images from previous dissections as a backdrop to the work we are eager to participate in. The circle takes an unusually long time to navigate. I suppose the absence of our donors in this hotel meeting space has allowed everyone to ramble on for double the time we normally would. Many in the room are eager to share what they know, and I am irritated by this attitude of superiority. I spend much of the day wandering the hotel lobby, wondering if I should leave my housemates and head to our Airbnb, to relieve myself of the torture of listening, and everyone else the torture of my sour mood. In the end, I make it through the day, but I feel a gurgling of emotion now that I’ve extracted myself from work and the anticipation of family inquiry. The release of daily pressure has allowed anxiety to surface. In the same way I held my yoga practice responsible for the grief it illuminated, I’m blaming my current unrest on the strangers around me in the lab. 

I choose my donor based on the living bodies at the table. I am full of judgment for the other students in the room, and I want to be as far away as possible from those I am unjustly annoyed by. 

There are things I came to see, and I feel a sense of urgency with the loss of our first day. The unfixed lab is shorter by one day because we compress the six-day dissection into five, respecting the rate of decomposition. With the extra day taken to complete our donor’s bloodwork, our course is now down to four, with the addition of an hour to each day in an attempt to recover some of the lost time. The gesture is appreciated, but I find the longer day only heightens my fatigue and corresponding grump. Now I’m the one missing out on the adventure because I’m projecting an experience I had expected to have. 

The night of our second full day with the bodies, I dream about lying down in a bed with an elderly woman next to me. She is pale and fragile, exhausted from whatever we had been doing earlier in the dream. She’s naked and has fallen asleep on top of the covers, which concerns me because I feel a need to take care of her, to keep her warm. But I don’t know what she needs and, for whatever reason, I don’t ask. When I awake later in the dream, she appears to be dead. Staring at her pale, naked body, I have a moment of panic but quickly realize that even if she is dead, it’s okay. I go back to sleep feeling both terrified and despondent about the unpredictable flow of life and death. Later, when I awake, she responds to me as I speak and I can’t be sure if I was mistaken earlier or if she has revived. 

I awake for real, disturbed by the dream, feeling heavy and unresolved about nothing in particular. 

It takes me a long time to land once I get home. I’m stirred emotionally from the lab in a new way. This time I am self-analyzing, working at how to be more agreeable. I feel like I need to take up less space. These feelings rise up in me from time to time: remnants of my own observation of how I was responded to as a child. Leaving me to believe myself to be less important than everyone else. I vacillate between being too loud and too grand in my efforts to be seen, and my need to shrink away unnoticed. Both of which take effort. 

I too am “unfixed.” Old traumas are decomposing and being sloughed away, but not without a fight. The stagnant spaces within me are slowly filling with new experiences that have matured to match the newer levels of cognition I am capable of. Emotional metabolism happens each time I take a mindful breath, move my body through sensation, or contemplate an event. Still, I go weeks at a time when I avoid my yoga practice, hoping that whatever is rising up will solidify into a fixed state and fade into the background. Intellectually, I know that if I allow my state to stiffen up and become solid, it will require much more of me to soften it up later, so I may as well dive in. 

Truthfully, I like the deep dive. The intensity fills me with purpose and my curiosity keeps me present. The unfixed nature is breathtakingly repugnant. It’s constantly changing and quickly morphing into the compost that ripens the soil for new growth. 

And the smell.  

My god, the smell.