Tonight is the last night before our final anatomy demo, marking our final dissection. It's a bittersweet feeling; on one hand, I'm relieved that we won't have to bear the tediousness of anatomy much longer. On the other, it's been an amazing experience working with the cadaver.
I've had an odd relationship with the cadaver. At first, caution rapidly led to a feeling of warmth for the man. He had given up so much to allow us to learn. He had much to teach us, and rapidly became just another member of the team.
As the dissections progressed, however, he rapidly began to become less and less of a person. We removed his brain, dissected out his eyes, sawed his head in half. I no longer met the cadaver with a feeling of fondness, but rather an odd mixture of sadness and clinical distance.
I talked about anatomy with my uncle at my grandmother's funeral, an uncle I was meeting for the first time as an adult. I told him about the dreams I've had about the cadaver, about the mixture of gratefulness and guilt-- and an odd desire to find out what he was like as a person, his occupation, a name. We talk about these things over water and tea eggs while waiting for my grandmother's cremation, and it's here that I learn that my uncle has the ability to see spirits.
He says that he's had the ability since he was ten, and he can see and hear spirits. The spirits look like shadows, he says. They talk with him, and he talks back-- and he thinks that anybody can have this ability, as long as they tried. I'm amazed by the details he provides throughout the funeral, a play-by-play commentary on my grandmother's progression, and a report on the reincarnation status of my grandfather down to every last detail. My parents seem to believe what he says.
After listening to my dreams about the cadaver, he diagnoses me with spirit attachment. Many people who donate their bodies, he explains, often regret their decision after death. There's two possibilities here-- one, that the cadaver's spirit has attached itself to you and is mad for what you've done. Alternatively, the cadaver's spirit has left and a secondary spirit has found occupancy in the body, and now demands rent for our time. Things may become dangerous if the spirit remains attached, he says. You're in the States, so you need to buy yourself a Bible. And this is exactly what you need to do.
My uncle offered an interesting anthropological conundrum. On one hand, he offered a belief system that's not implausible, and consistent with the rest of reality. His system of beliefs even accounts for the polytheism on the planet, explaining how the Judeo-Christian God could coexist and remain as the one true God alongside Buddha and Guan-Yin. On the other hand, I didn't feel like I could really buy into his system of beliefs without evidence. Yet, as a student of medical anthropology, don't I usually declare competing systems of etiology to be equally valid? And at the very bottom line, if his beliefs are valid, do I really want to risk the consequences of spirit attachment?
I tell my anatomy partner about my uncle and his proposed treatment plan, and he points out that as a medical student, I'd have to conduct such a ritual late at night to avoid (perhaps not undue) mockery. Weeks pass by, and in the meanwhile, I wonder if there are other students with symptoms of spirit attachment. A classmate says that she sees fascia everywhere she looks; when she closes her eyes, up in the clouds. Another talks of dreams late at night of making sausages from human intestine. Yet another says his room his haunted, and how he's been plagued by nightmares for the last week. Regardless of etiology, spirit attachment may be a valid analogue for stresses that we encounter in medical school or in the anatomy lab.
Tonight, my anatomy partner and I completed our final preparations for our last anatomy presentation tomorrow. As we're cleaning up, I'm surprised to hear him speak the words that my uncle had suggested. We're thankful for this experience that you've given us, he says to the dead man. We thank God for all that we've learned. We both grab a zipper, and wave our hands in arcs to close the body bag in the center. We don't have a Bible. A shaft of light falls from our dissection lamp onto the table, and this is the image I hold in my head, as my anatomy partner gently clicks off the light from above.
