18. Everything Dies

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

I make the difficult decision to take a year off from dissection. I want to allow all the lab visits to truly percolate. Somehow a year is not enough time to excavate all the revelations of a donor, before piling on another. I want to see what more can come to the surface. And the faint whisper of this book is on the horizon as I commit to my morbid reprieve.

As I write these dissection stories and string them together, I reconnect with an old friend from another era of my life. David and I lost touch sometime after I moved from Toronto, where we first met more than two decades ago. Twenty-four years my senior, an artist and free spirit, David worked with clay and engaged in writing groups to elevate his creativity. I was in my mid-twenties when we met and was immediately enamoured with him. He writes to me in sentimental detail about a time our paths crossed after a long gap in communication, which confirms a mutual affection because I have the same moment recorded in my journal pages from 1999. I’m tempted to share it with him, but I’m too self-conscious to reveal myself in that way. He becomes a writing mentor to me, critiquing the book as I write, sending me feedback every couple of days. He reveals that he is terrified to read about dissection and death but trusts that I will metaphorically hold his hand through it. I ease him in by sending him the chapter “To Body by Breath,” giving him a window into who I was in the early years of our friendship. Initially I set out to write a creative nonfiction about the dissection lab. I have no interest in exposing myself through the dissection, but it is David who helps me to see that the stories of the donors come alive through me as I navigate the terrain of a dead body and all that rises up through the experience of cutting one open.

He dissects each sentence and asks me to fill in the blanks of what he imagines I am going through. Not satisfied with my protests that the book is not a memoir, David urges me deeper into the significance of all this body exploration. He is tugging at the uncomfortable truths of my inquiry. It is only in retrospect that I understand he has suspected all along that this inquiry was about so much more than the physical body.

At one point, a few weeks go by without any word, and then he emails to tell me he has been in the hospital. Preliminary scans have revealed that he is full of cancer. I think of Fable’s insides and silently fear that he is not long for this earth. After another few weeks of silence, I send him the journal entry from 1999. I want to know that he has seen it, so I send it through Messenger, which will tell me when he’s been active. It goes unread for weeks, and my fear has me searching online obituaries daily. We don’t have any mutual connections, and scanning his Facebook friends, I don’t recognize anyone I knew from twenty-three years ago. I feel helpless to find out any further information, and then one day my journal entry shows up as having been read.

He doesn’t reply, and I make up excuses as to why. He’s in his seventies now and probably doesn’t have portable technology (he learned how to use Messenger from our first communications there just months prior). Maybe he’s engaged in intense treatment and has to focus all his energy on healing. Perhaps he’s in hospice care and someone else read the message to him. Maybe he never read it at all and died before it was even sent. I have absolutely no way of knowing. I want to track him down and show up at his bedside, but he has seen to it that I cannot. I don’t know if it’s intentional or if it just unfolded that way. Then, about a week after the message is read, he is gone. All the correspondence on his end of our communications has disappeared and his profile photo is replaced with the default gray silhouette placeholder. Erased is the conversation stream where our writing echoed one another as we both described the moment we reunited on the street in front of my workplace, obviously both secretly charmed by the other. Me with a cigarette in hand, David circling back on his bike for an embrace. Still no obituary, and I can’t understand why his friends would erase his account without alerting his connections of his status. Did he erase it himself and choose not to say a final goodbye? I may never know the details of his presumed death, and I feel more than ever the importance of end-of-life ritual. I need closure so I can mourn him properly. I wonder if he was able to disconnect from his body without struggle. I hope he was surrounded by those he trusted, those who loved him.

I wonder if he donated his body.

And I’m still searching for his obituary.

I spend the early months of the year with my nose down, taking advantage of a steady flow of clients, barely aware that I would normally be getting itchy for the approach of the spring lab week. As March rolls around, I don’t order nitrile gloves and pull my scrubs out of storage—the world is abuzz with COVID-19 pandemic preparations. I don’t know how I feel about it. Mostly, I guess, I feel invincible and wish everyone would calm down. But then my city, along with everyone else’s, is completely shut down. I can’t work and will be without income for an indefinite period. It reminds me of the solitude I felt traveling in Costa Rica. I’ve been through worse. I’ve got this.

Figuring this is the gift of time I need to really dig into the writing, what I am not registering yet is the underlying stress that has silenced my creativity.

My social media feed is plastered with fear and anxiety. Mostly it’s how much everyone is losing monetarily, and I’m triggered by it. Of course, I am concerned about this type of loss for myself as well, but I’m also oddly grateful that I don’t have more to lose. I’ve always managed to get by with whatever I had, and sometimes that has been credit alone. It’s scary, but it’s not the end of the world. I guess you have to traverse the experience once or twice to trust that it’s all going to work out fine. I am practicing the mandated social distancing but I’m taking it a bit further out of emotional self-preservation and avoiding texts and phone calls. I’m not sure why.

One gray morning, I awake with a unique heaviness, and unknowingly embark upon a day of scalpel-less dissection.

Journal Entry:

Day 7 COVID-19 Isolation

I awake feeling lonelier than usual. I haven’t had any physical contact with a human for seven days. I haven’t touched anyone, and no one has touched me. My social media feed is full of anxiety and fear.

I realize that I am feeling anger, which is my way of warding off vulnerability. I hate being vulnerable, and I wish to be brave enough to have someone who will hold space for me to do what it is that I hate.

It’s drizzling outside, which is usually my favorite kind of day. I don’t really want to get out, but I also see that if I’m going to get any air, I need to do it before the rain ramps up. I’m also attracted to the fact that the streets are empty and, despite my loneliness, the vacancy inviting me outside is comforting.

The walk helps, but not much.

I don’t feel like doing yoga today, but my body hurts from inactivity. My mind hurts from overactivity. I roll out my mat so I can just lie around and do some passive stretching, and suddenly I am compelled to do 108 sun salutations. It’s been more than five years since I have engaged in the repetition of movement and breath that is 108. The urge is so strong that I don’t even really consider it, my body is already in the flow before I make the mental commitment.

I have been avoiding deep practice for the past few weeks; not sure why, but sometimes it’s just like that. The depth of the breath feels amazing, and I hope it will pull me into the present moment.

It doesn’t take long for my body to tell me just how far away my last 108 was. My muscles are burning with the demand, and the internal friction intensifies. My mind is simultaneously raging and delighting in the forced tapas, and I haven’t even completed the first twenty-five.

What strikes me the most is that the combined calm of the breath and fire in my body is not enough to shut off my mind. I analyze the reasons I am both triggered and shut down by the panic around me. I panic too, but I prefer to do it quietly. I was conditioned to emote in private.

Huh. This is a revelation.

I feel anger that I have not let anyone in, and because of that, I am in isolation by myself. It doesn’t make sense to me that I am isolating further by barely responding to calls or texts. I know people love me and support me, but I feel better if I don’t have to be vulnerable to it. I want to be left alone.

Around the halfway mark, the heat inside is beading up on my skin. I haven’t broken a sweat through my practice in a very long time, and it feels terrific. My body really hurts, and each forward fold brings a sensation I scarcely remember from a previous era of my practice. It’s been well over a decade since I’ve felt this kind of challenge through movement. It grounds me in a physical sense, exactly how I hoped it would, but I do not like it one bit.

My mind eventually wanders away from self-analysis and into the wonders of the human body. My breath feels so deep, I am certain it is reaching the deepest alveoli—oxygen exchange centers of my lungs—cleaning out a stagnancy that has probably been there for years. The increase of systemic circulation called upon by my burning legs is pushing congestion toward the exits of my skin, kidneys, and exhale. Stress hormones are releasing in a therapeutically effective way. Floyd the cat hasn’t budged from the ottoman in front of me.

The 108th repetition is unceremonious, and I find my way to savasana as matter-of-factly as I took up the first salutation ninety minutes prior. I feel grounded for the first time in weeks.

For my second outing of the day, I’m in the drugstore, grateful that the shelf with Epsom salts is not empty. There are red duct-tape markers on the floor telling me where to stand as I wait in line to pay, so I opt for the self-checkout as a way to continue avoiding the personal contact I desperately desire.

My bath is delicious. I lie flat in the tub with my legs crossed so I can immerse my head up to the corners of my eyes, nose, and mouth. I’m listening to the melancholic tones of Pink Floyd through the muffling of the water around my ears. I continue to lie just like this, and pull out the drain stopper with my toes to feel the water pull at my skin on its way down the drain. I have never noticed this sensation before; the weight of my body feels to have doubled with the water’s increased gravity, and there is an emotional grounding accompanying the physical sensation.

The lightness left behind by the physical intensity of the day is short-lived, but I am encouraged by my body’s quick response.

I have been through worse than this.

In yoga a sun salutation is a string of movements connected by breath. The flow warms up the body, while the physical demand opens the lungs and strengthens the diaphragm. Repetition of the sequence is considered a moving meditation, especially when repeated 108 times. Yoga, although not considered a religion, has strong ties to Hindu practices. A mala—like a rosary—is used for prayer and mantra recital: it has 108 beads. Mantras and prayers repeated 108 times are believed to bring good fortune—108 is considered a sacred number. For me, flowing through 108 sun salutations is an exercise in presence. The physical and emotional revelations that surface in the ninety minutes of the yoga mala extract me, at least momentarily, from the worry of what the COVID lockdown will bring.

I am truly seeing for the first time that vulnerability makes me angry. Today the work of forcing my body through 108 repetitions, something I have done many times, is pushing this deeply stored information out of my cells. I think it’s a little bit funny, and I wonder if I had realized it sooner, would I be easier to be with? As if just knowing something heals it.

I marvel at my nervous system and how my body chooses to reveal myself to me gradually, as though there is a method to this healing.

There is a farm that spans over a thousand acres right in the middle of my city. My morning bike commute takes me along the Ottawa River, and at the end of the day I take the shorter route home through the farm. I notice as I ride through on my evening commute that the speed bumps have not yet been reinstalled following their winter removal. The obstacle of this sudden bump in the road slows traffic during the snowless months but obstructs the snowplows in winter. Not having ridden my bike in months, my body still reacts at the last second as I approach the spot where one of these mounds would normally be affixed to the road, and I’m off my seat, preparing to jump the obstacle that is no longer there.

How many behaviors has my body recorded? At what point do I reach a steady enough presence to override the reflexes to an obstacle that no longer exists?

There is a slow emergence of clarity following my 108 sun salutation practice. My body has been trying to deliver this message for years, and fear has held me back—all those practices where I was unconscious to the waking, but on a deeper level must have known, and so I fled; all those climbing dates I hoped would be canceled. The way we put earbuds in and turned away from one another while dissecting Fable… It’s all making sense.

Science tells us that our sense organs are the strongest connection to memory, and we can unearth seeds of the past by stimulating the right sense at the right time. It took years of hearing the rustling in a tree for me to accept that there would be no troop of howler monkeys playing in the maple canopy of my Canadian neighborhood, and I still flinch when approaching long, snakelike branches along the bike trails—leftover survival awareness from my time living in Costa Rica. What nature stimulates inside of me momentarily holds my attention. Deeper still, there is a hope that I can cruise through life undetected if I perform well enough to escape the watchful eye of criticism. The brain mapping of feeling is harder to overwrite than the ones stimulated by vision. My eyes will show me quickly that it’s a stick and not a snake. The emotion of inadequacy, however, is not as tangible and cannot be cut out with a scalpel.

I’m still unable to reconcile the parts of me that are eager to both transcend and avoid my pain. There are instances where the boldness to look within shocks even me. Then others when I feel the need to close my eyes tight and turn away.

It’s an indecent exposure.

For me, the indecency is in the way my body betrays my mind to expose all the emotion that’s been stored in my cells, because I don’t want to face it head-on.

Yet I can saw a head in half, unabashedly entering the sanctity of a former human being to satisfy my morbid curiosity.

Where does the connection between life and death overlap with the disconnection of the same? Death takes away all of the intellectual and emotional movements that enrich a life, leaving behind a carcass that can barely provide a tiny whisper into the soul that once resided there.

I’m never going to have the answer I seek about where the body and the mind intersect. I’m fascinated by the fact that when I refer to my body, it is as a possession. My mind is thought of as the part that is embodied and living, as if it’s superior. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my body is the wisdom of my existence. My body informs my mind. My body has revealed all the words in these pages and all the joy and ecstasy of intimacy, but when I refer to those things, I say that it is “I” who has seen or done or experienced. When there is physical pain, I say “my body” hurts. When there is emotional pain, I say that “I am hurting.” When the two overlap, I feel closer to authenticity.

It’s rare, but some of my best yoga practices have been the ones where I can fully allow my gaze to soften and blur the edges of precision. The breath becomes a metronome of rhythm, lulling me into a state that is somewhere beyond concentration but deep inside the fruits of where I hope concentration leads. I feel fully embodied and separate from my own flesh all at once. It’s complete bliss, total ambivalence. A state of nearly unbearable pleasure.

There is a lot of distraction in dissection. A constant buzz of conversation as more and more is revealed. The questions that never cease. The contemplation, discussion, excitement. It’s a loud space both internally and externally, and occasionally I can locate a womb to slip into, unnoticed by even myself. I sink into a steady pulse of delicate poking and slicing—really just zoning out for a bit to give my eyes and thoughts a reprieve. Allowing my own aperture to widen, taking in more light, but as the field expands, the detail blurs and what is revealed is equally more as it is less. This state is the container of revelation I will stumble upon later outside the lab. Like that joke we used to tell in high school when we learned about osmosis—we laughed about the absurdity of gaining the answers without studying, by merely being present during the lecture. Every now and again I encounter the safe that houses those meditative moments from the lab and discover again that my body guards each volume of those experiences, and they are lying in wait to be discovered anew.

Working on other people’s bodies through massage, I revisit the same cave of embodied memory. I refer to my massage room as the “thought chamber” because of the silence the space holds for two bodies to venture into. There is a lot of actual and silent conversation inspired in the treatment room. Sometimes I am active in thought and problem-solving, other times I find the vessel of the body’s wisdom is openly pouring out information I am tuned into. I can zone out while giving a massage, but it doesn’t take away from my presence with the body I am working on, because my hands are extensions of my nervous system and the two cannot be separated.

I am introspective by nature. I love how the rain sandwiches me between the low ceiling of the atmosphere and the floor of the earth. Like being under a weighted blanket, I feel safe in the heaviness and solitude of a gray day. My cells begin to stir in the warm safety of this cocoon, and bizarre revelations surface. I have always been this way.

When I am sad and overcome with melancholy, I reach for music, movies, and images that emulate my mood. I’m like a tuning fork. I resonate with the tones that sharpen my internal vibration.

I need my body to push me. I observe on my bike commute through the farm or along the river that, if there is wind, I will encounter it on these trails where there is little foliage to shelter me. It’s a powerful irony that the times the wind is at my back, I sail along effortlessly, oblivious to the ease and joy of this moment. Then I round a corner and am hit hard in the face with the turning of the wind. The effort and frustration are palpable as I fight the forces of nature through the fatigue of my legs, which were in the bliss of ignorance only moments before. The physical challenge reunites me with the present moment. Without it, I forget to appreciate when there is ease in my life.

I feel a little (a lot) as if I am leaving dissection behind. I’ve extracted the biggest chunks of learning from the past sixteen years of this repeated journey, and the pebbles that will fill the gaps are releasing still in the quiet moments. The same thing happened with teaching yoga. I taught for sixteen years before the environment changed enough for me to move on. I didn’t leave the practice: I reclaimed it for myself. All those years of leading others to the body kept me at an imperceptible distance from my own, and the learning that has since surfaced has been breathtaking. This moment is perhaps the precipice of something new. The last lab I attended before beginning this book was a whole new experience. Altered by the near absence of familiar faces. There was only one other person in the lab apart from Sallie, our assistant, from previous years.

I am amused that, despite all the familiarities surrounding me, the smallest, most inconsistent detail is the one that disarms me most. I feel the absence of my comrades, and it forces me to embody the experience in a fresh way. I move through the week navigating the living bodies in the room more than the dead. My experience is called upon to assist in the systematic removal of our donor’s layers, which are tacked down firmly, like Fable’s. I see myself reflected in each participant at our table. The hacker who is innocently and excitedly exploring while carelessly cutting too deep, too fast. The frustrated bodyworker who is meticulously dissecting toward a textbook image. The manic comedian emotionally distancing, with a witty remark for nearly everything we look at. The observant one who is not afraid to comment on all the things we are thinking but not saying to one another. The know-it-all who feels the need to launch into unsolicited educational lectures on what we are looking at.

It’s exhausting, and I find myself slipping out early for lunch almost daily to avoid having to dine with anyone. A deep weariness settles over me, and I return home in need of more rest than before I left.

Mornings by the river and the monotony of routine allow my nervous system to slowly settle. At work, I find myself frustrated with clients seeking a quick fix, and I know I need a break. I change my schedule to work a bit less, which helps bring back the joy I feel toward the body. But I am never quite full or recharged; I have an underlying feeling that I am chasing my routine.

Four weeks into COVID isolation, I feel somewhat myself again. The initial anxiety has worn off; my body has settled into a ritual of yoga, walking, and biking, causing my mental fog to lift. Living has replaced my habitual pattern of doing, and I wonder how to bring this into the future once I take up work again. I am not bad at self-care, but judging by my body’s response to this slowing down, I have still fallen short in this realm. What I notice the most is the sound of peristalsis coming from my gut as it digests more frequently. I don’t feel markedly less stressed, but my physiology is telling me otherwise.

It’s been a profound internal dissection spanning decades, and although the work may never be fully complete, I feel the need to assimilate to the ways in which my corporal biology has surely been rearranged. As I dig deeper into why my self-care regimen has not been enough to recharge my batteries, I consider that it’s not my physical work that is exhausting me. My brain is fueled by my body. I know this deeply. I believe my body is a storehouse for all that is unprocessed, but not once have I considered that it’s also been charged with the task of providing energy for every activity. Physical, mental, and emotional. I refuel regularly to support only two of these functions, ignorantly overlooking the toll of sustaining regular emotional metabolism.

This isolation period has got me thinking a lot about control, and also fear of the unknown. I love control and have a deep fear of the unknown. I have been ever so slowly, over years, inching toward letting go of one and embracing the other. And damn, it has been a journey.

Journal Entry:

It’s the birthday of an acquaintance, and the party invitation states a 4:00 p.m. start with a 9:00 p.m. finish. It’s Sunday of a long week, I haven’t left my house all day, and I only partially care that I think I should be voted by my peers “most likely to cancel.”

I am gradually beginning to own and understand my introverted nature that, until the age of the Internet, I did not realize was a legitimate thing.

Anyway, I’m great with spontaneity because it’s a time when everyone knows there is a fifty-fifty chance of success, which takes the pressure off. I feel bad about canceling plans, ignoring invitations, not showing up, or avoiding the phone, but not bad enough to stop doing it. I pay for it through a harsh inner dialogue, though. I still haven’t embraced my true nature, because it feels to be in stark contrast to everyone around me. I can push through a lot, but to my great annoyance, I cannot override the introvert.

At 8:00 p.m. I look out the window to see the light in the clear summer sky begin to soften, and I imagine a beautiful sunset along the river. I don’t want to be known as the one everyone expects to bail, and the thought, along with the sunset, has me urgently carrying my bike down the steps and into the street.

The long, meandering river path is busy with couples and families enjoying the slow descent of the day, and I feel revived by having motivated myself out of the house. By the time I arrive at the party, everyone has already departed, and the only thing left to do is clean up the mess. So my friend and I have a private visit as we scrape plates of half-eaten birthday cake into the garbage and wash the dishes. We are both equally pleased and surprised by my arrival. Satisfied with our visit, I prepare to return to my nest.

It’s dark now, and I realize my rear light is dead. It’s a fifty-minute bike ride home and I need to decide between one of two unappealing routes. I would prefer to go through the city, where traffic and streetlights give me the illusion of safety, but without the light, I’m not guaranteed to be seen from behind.

My other option is the way I came. Along the winding trail of the river. It’s a moonless night with no traffic lights or overhead lamps to illuminate the path; I would have to rely solely on my front LED bike light for guidance.

I am afraid of getting hit by a car on the street, but more afraid of what lurks in the dark along the river. I decide that, despite my fear, the river is the safer option.

Adrenaline has me a bit shaky, and I pedal fast to get it over with. I quickly transition from wanting to get home as quick as possible to fully embracing the moment because I suddenly realize I’m having a lot of fun.

The light on my bike is strong enough to illuminate no more than three feet ahead. The curves are coming quick, and I see them with barely enough time to stay on course; each time I turn my handlebars to round a corner, the trail disappears from sight while my lamp lights up the grass beyond the curve. The challenge delivers me into the moment, leaving my anxiety back at the birthday party I didn’t attend. In the absence of sight, there are dips in the trail that my body takes in well before my mind, and the experience is invigorating. I pass a few sets of glowing eyes, but I’m moving so quickly, they are behind me before I can identify a threat.

I make it home in record time, realizing that it’s an illusion to think I can ever see more than a few feet ahead of where I stand at any given moment