17. Cardboard Coffin

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

—Leonardo da Vinci

On our final day in the lab, as we wrap up all the tiny details that we still have enough patience to pick away at, time quickly becomes an urgent matter. All the hours it took to peel back the layers and uncover the nuances of this beautiful organism will be reduced to the minutes it takes to seal up the bag inside the cardboard box.

Each box is labeled with a number that identifies the donor. The name we bestowed upon them will live on only through those of us who will share the stories revealed by their tissues. Over the duration of the course, we have carefully placed the entirety of their soft-tissue remains in buckets lined with heavy-duty black plastic bags labeled with their number. Bones and organs lie on the tables where they have been picked over even more completely than the Thanksgiving turkey I described from my first visit to the lab, and now we are faced with the task of closure.

Looking at the tables where each donor’s parts are spread out, I think back to the misconstrued emotion I felt upon viewing my first cadaver. Here now, I am looking upon a deep internal process, one I could not possibly have appreciated before completing this experience myself. And likely still could not welcome until I had spent several hundred hours sifting through our collective anatomy. Actual and metaphorical.

The bones with tendon and muscle that grip so tight even a scalpel blade falters to successfully clean it away show me the awesome stubbornness of our structure and the emotional baggage we identify with so eagerly. I’m having an internal conflict surrounding the end of this project. There is still so much more to see, but the pull of home and the lighthearted ease of regular life sit like a big sigh on the horizon. I am so ready to sink into that.

Lab cleanup is not unlike a large family gathering where loved ones break off into small groups of chatter in the kitchen and dining room. We are attending equally to the room, the donors, and one another.

The steel surface of each table is wiped down to a shine, with the box placed on top. Inside the box is a heavy white vinyl body bag. It has a wide, sturdy zipper that wraps nearly two-thirds of the way around, allowing us to easily open it up, drape its sides over the walls of the box to be lined with a second clear plastic sheet, where our donor will be laid to rest. Most of the embalming fluid has been released from the body through the process of dissection, but the layers of plastic will contain anything that remains.

We take great care as we return all of the body to the box, beginning with the bones. The head goes where the head goes, and the feet take their spot at the other end of this coffin. We lay them out as they arrived, reconstructing the full form of organ and bones, loosely fitting together the pieces of human-shaped puzzle. The bags of soft tissue are the last things placed in the box, and they rest just beneath what’s left of the rib cage. I am not yet any closer to reconciling the physical and emotional container of a human being.

As we reassemble the body, I am emotionally reconstructing my layers. It’s going to take me more than the few minutes we spend arranging the donor, but the process begins here. Candles have been burning all week on a makeshift altar that was laid out on the morning of our arrival. The altar sits between our morning circle and the side of the room where the dissection work took place.

The first items on the altar arrive with Gil as he prepares the lab for us on day one: candles, an aromatherapy jar full of pine needles, essential oils, fragrant barks and leaves, and two tuning forks. When one fork is struck and its pure tone quietly rings, the second fork, held close by, will pick up the vibration and respond as if it too had been struck. Whether we know it or not, this is exactly what we experience through dissection: the resonance of the body’s energy and experience. It is a vibration that moves through the room and all the bodies, living and dead, while we work.

Each day the altar expands as we add sprigs of flowers, pine cones, crystals, leaves, and any other objects from nature that catch our eyes.

Once the boxes have been sealed, they are wheeled into an asterisk formation, with the foot ends of the tables touching. The altar is divided and placed atop each donor inside their cardboard coffin. The room is cleaner now than on the day we arrived, and we circle our donors ungloved, holding hands, as we did on day one. The gratitude is palpable. There are a lot of smiles, some tears, and moments of unprecedented quiet in the room as we navigate our emotions separately and side by side. It’s the most unconventional funeral any of us have ever attended, and its proceedings began days, weeks, months, or even years before, when the body died. A lot of detail went into their arrival in our lab. People at home are mourning the loss of their loved one while we cut them open in a celebration that antagonizes the usual grief surrounding death. These bodies didn’t need any makeup for our extensive viewing. No glue was used to fix their hands, or anything else, in place. We have laughed, cried, and shared personal stories of grief, triumph, and ambition in their presence.

Our circle moves from around the boxes to the open space beside them, where we can squeeze in close to one another before our final parting. For me, the experience gets deeper as I put down the instruments of dissection and return to regular life. Once we leave the lab, I can reach out to those who shared the space, but without their physical presence, I get quiet and travel deeper into all that the dissection has revealed. There isn’t time to go beyond the scratching of an emotional surface in a six-day excursion. A rabbit hole of internal inquiry is not available while one stands over a cadaver. There is too much physical matter to take in. For me, the emotional journey must wait. There are times when I return home feeling so light and rejuvenated, as if I had just spent a week in the rainforest; weeks will pass before the dissection finally begins to infiltrate my sleep. It’s not particularly revealing. Merely the presence of layers, tissue, and cutting that alert me to the fact that I am processing something dissection-related on a deeper level.

Our final circle breaks after we squeeze in tight enough to feel the warmth of the body two people over. A few foot stomps, our grip intensifies for a moment, and then we all let go. It takes a while to get out of the room because the space is still holding us. If you can’t remember who you hugged, hug them again. Get one last picture together. Don’t forget to include the plastic skeleton. Within a few weeks, by the time our donors are cremated and laid to rest, the group directory will land in my in-box.

I’ll take just one extra day off work once I’m back home. Long enough to unpack and launder at least some of the formaldehyde out of my lab coat. That smell will never really escape the fibers of that coat—it’s had a lot of exposure. I’m eager to get my hands on living bodies, and my practice is full of them following a lab week. Everyone wants to know about it, but I haven’t even begun to digest. I need to feel a pulse and see the twitch of muscle responding to my touch. In the quiet of a treatment, my nervous system begins to settle down, and memory stirs.

My hands are more sensitive while working with clients, and I feel things with greater detail. I move more slowly around tension after a lab visit, exploring the texture and staying present as it begins to dissolve. My brain leads me out of an area where my client feels pain and into the areas that connect to it, potentially revealing the source. Although it’s difficult to articulate exactly how dissection informs my massage practice, there is no doubt it does. Not everything that is felt can be intellectualized.

An interior disquiet surfaces in the silence of my massage room. I know better than to busy up the mental space that the pause from my daily routine has offered, yet I do it anyway. I come home from the lab ripe to explore my own insides, but an old habit makes me pick up as if nothing transpired the week before while I was literally cutting open a human heart.

I go back to work following the same bike path. I stop at the same spot for my coffee and eat the same breakfast. I problem-solve the body and its aches with my clients. The comfort of routine envelops me like a soft but impenetrable armor. Months pass and the seam around the neglected revelation of the lab has mostly bonded again. The moment will come when some benign event—a popped tire or expired coffee cream—will rip open the vulnerable tissue that had been ripe for healing a short time ago. The once-clean incision is now frayed and raw at the edges, demanding immediate attention.

Mornings become busier as I access more of the dissection through writing. The commute along the river on my bike unites me with the environment around me, somehow igniting the climate within. The revelations of the body are more readily available when I am not searching for recall. The calm of the river reminds me of a first-time participant who asks with a slight tone of judgment in the circle one morning, “Why do you all keep coming back? What is it you are seeking to find?”

Jim, the wise one, responds by saying, “I walk in nature all the time. I take the same path often and always discover something new. Sometimes it’s in nature and sometimes it’s in me. What’s the difference anyway? The body is an extension of nature, is it not?”

Weeks after one of my more recent body explorations, I dream of a dissection where we have a twelve-year-old girl on the table. We are excited to have such a young body, yet in the way dreams distort things, the energy of the others is present but it’s just her and me in the room. She’s standing on the table in a restless dance while speaking with me. She clasps her hands first in front, then behind, telling me that death is no big deal, but she misses her dad. There is a sadness to her as she speaks of him, and I feel envious because I believe she can go and visit him, while he can’t get to her. It has to be her—the dead one—who reaches out. I wake up thinking of myself missing my dad at the same age, wondering why he hasn’t come to visit me in decades. I have a vague memory of a day while working with Fable, where I felt his presence in the lab, and I go back to my journal, hoping to bring the memory into focus because all I can access is a tiny nudge of feeling. I wish I could articulate the emotion of the moment, but it’s not available. Maybe it’s the distance between now and the years that have passed since I saw him last, or the maturing of my grief. My journal reveals nothing in particular, just the sensation that he was with me navigating that terrain. For years, I allowed the frame containing his photo to lie facedown on a shelf in my closet. I wanted to take away his father title because, in his absence, I didn’t think he deserved it. I no longer wanted to carry sentiment for a man who had barely been in my life, and I was not ready to forgive him for leaving me in a dysfunctional family. It wasn’t until I started studying the body that I began to realize that my father’s cells, containing all his memory and experience, are in me, just as his father’s were in him. It doesn’t matter how short his role in my life was—his presence is literally stamped into my physical and emotional DNA. Somehow this revelation allows me to release the search for meaning.

Along with thoughts on the clitoris, one of the chalkboards in the three-week lab displayed a growing list of books, all body-related. A short time after returning home, we receive the list, all fifty-plus participants cc’d. We were so deeply connected by the final day, saying goodbye was difficult. Returning home with so much to process, we reach for one another through several channels, and often. For days we continue the morning circle through that one email. We “Reply All” without censor; there is still so much laughter to be shared. As our group solidified inside the lab, we became more candid and vulgar. If you could assign an identity to a group of people through their use of one word, it would be fuck. The word embodies everything we still have to express—in any context—and with one another we can do it freely. There are dozens of emails in that chain, each containing two or three fucks at least. The laughter escalates while the topics become more obscure. And then the “Reply All,” of all replies:

“Can you all take me off your list? I have no idea who you are… Please don’t send me any more emails.”

There was a typo in one of the addresses, and this poor stranger has been privy to all our raunchy ramblings, which prompts another eruption of messages. Eventually we slowly assimilate back into routine, and I’m sure, to the relief of our guest, the email chain goes dormant.