The Donor

[TW: depictions of death]

For the better part of the course, I had presumed the eye sockets to be empty. Where the eyeballs had gone was unclear to me, but I rested in the comfort of not having to stare into them.

One autumn afternoon, however, I had dared to peek through the slit between her eyelids. I had become desensitized to the smell of formalin by then. That, and to the sight of corpses. One of my lab-partners pulled the green sheet away, unveiling the body on the metal table, and the fumes that seemed to become more potent week after week tickled my nostrils. I got close to her stiff face, so close I could caress her cheek with my breathing. I looked inside. The space underneath her eyelids was as hollow as I had assumed it to be. But at the bottom of the orbit, a black pearl glistened.

“What do you think this is?” I asked another student as she joined the table, tightening the plastic apron around her waist. “See that black thing?”

She peeked into the other eye socket. “The optical nerve?”

“That’s where it should be. But nerves aren’t black,” I said.

“I don’t get it. Where are the eyes?”

“That is the eye,” a masculine voice sounded behind us. I turned to find one of the instructors gloving up.

“It’s just dehydrated from the embalming process,” he explained.

A chill ran down my spine. On my first day in that dissection lab, I had felt a tinge of nausea as I uncovered the body. I had gulped down hard as I had put the scalpel to the skin, not knowing how much resistance I would meet, nor what was awaiting inside. I had chosen to approach my first encounter with death with a scientific spirit. It’s just a body, like any other, I had told myself. It had worked wonders. Some fifteen minutes after the very first incision, I had forgotten all about the nausea. But as I now stared at those eyes, dried up like raisins, sunken deep into the socket, I felt the ice spread through my back and paralyze my limbs. The urge to close her half-open eyelids invaded me. I reasoned it would be weird, if not futile, to shut them together. Did rigor mortis take over the eyelids, too? I wasn’t about to find out. My stomach revolted in protest.

I shifted my eyes away from hers, as I would with any other stranger’s living eyes after a second too long of contact. It felt intrusive to look into them any longer. My eyes ran down her face, through the exposed carotid arteries of her neck, past the almost empty mediastinum, and landed on her abdomen. It had been opened through the linea alba, where all three layers of abdominal muscles, plus the fascia and the fat, had been parted to each side, like curtains to a window. The view they framed was one dominated by a red, smooth liver and endless pale-pink loops of intestine.

There she lay, her whole body exposed inside out. And out of all the things that could make a first-year medical student feel faint, the one thing that bothered me was knowing that her eyes were still there. Possibly watching.

“Are you starting the incisions on the leg?” my dissection partner asked from across the table.

“Getting right to it,” I pushed the sharp blade in place and walked over to the anterior thigh, far away from her stare.

I hovered the scalpel in the air, attempting to draw a straight line to the shin before pressing down. As I started the incision, I felt her black eyes clustered onto the back of my head. I tried to shake the cold away, to no avail. The skin, tough as leather, parted slowly as the blade sliced its way through. Yellow cells of fat bloomed underneath. Before dissection practices, I had never imagined humans would be so yellow on the inside. I knew there would be lots of red and white, like the men of muscle and bone depicted in every children’s science book. I remember being terrified of those illustrations as a little kid. Their blue eyes, amid a sea of red meat, freaked me out. Somehow, I had ended up going to medical school, where I was delighted to discover that those pictures didn’t make any justice to the vast amount of fat that is the human body. Bright, yellow fat. The color of the sun and of smiles. What would be of the world if humans were truly more sunshine than meat with a conscience?

My fingers dug into the fat to uncover the first of the muscles of the anterior thigh, musculus rectus femoris, and got a glimpse of the rest of the muscle group, shining in their fascia. Around me, the room echoed with the clinking of metal and the voices of young students. Latin terminology, mixed with casual conversation, jumped over the corpses: “What are you doing for your birthday?”, “I think I reached arteria femoralis”, “Have you started practice-exams?”, “Shit, I think I cut the nerve over”, “Hitting the bar at six?”

An instructor approached our table, her long pony-tail swaying behind her.

“Here, come closer,” she said. “Let’s review the internal organs in the abdomen before you focus too much on that leg.”

I put the scalpel down and picked at a blob of yellow stuck to its shaft. It danced back and forth between my fingers as I tried to unglue it from the latex glove. We grouped around the upper half of the body, and I turned my head completely to the abdomen, avoiding her gaze. The instructor hopped on the table by the end of the donor’s feet. Only a white coat separated her dress and buttocks from the metal underneath. Although clean at the moment, there was an ever-present threat of cadaveric juices flowing onto the drain by the other side of her hips. She beamed on as she unveiled the layers of intestines with a plastic stick and quizzed us on the arterial irrigation of the colon, the anatomical relations of the liver and the curious shape of the spleen (“two and a half oranges”, according to the textbook). She then focused our attention to the pelvis, and after drilling the student beside me with questions about the bladder, she tilted the organ up with her fingers. A soft gasp enveloped the group. The sight of a pink uterus, not bigger than the palm of a hand, emerged from beneath the bladder, complete with two grape-sized ovaries shining to each side.

The more weeks I spent dissecting, the less I tended to humanize the flesh in front of me. It was perhaps the mechanism that had allowed me to get through dissections without completely turning to veganism. But that uterus made the reality come rushing back: our anatomical model had once been just like me. Living, and able to bring life.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” the instructor smiled.

I instinctively placed a hand over the curve of my lower stomach. My womb cramped up under the plastic apron, sending a wave of pain down my legs, as it had a habit of doing every month. Had her periods made her as miserable as they made me? I thought of my own melodramatic uterus, and how I was standing in front of the closest thing I'd ever seen to a mirror of my insides. Only that her uterus was calm, too calm, and mine had picked up a war. Had that little pink organ carried children into this world? Whose first home had it once been? Were they walking out there right now, shuffling through the autumn leaves? A sea of questions arose, and I dove deep into it. How many people were left to remember her? And if I were ever to meet them, which I never would, what would they tell me? Her body could tell the story of age, but nothing more. I knew things about her body she had never known herself; peculiarities of her insides that she had lived and died with. But nothing more.

Who was she, my generous, anonymous, donor?

The instructor quizzed on around the table, probably on the anatomy of the pelvis. I wouldn't know. Her high-pitched voice had become but a distant echo. The questions, the only ones that felt relevant at that moment, kept blossoming in my mind. Had she believed in a God? Wherever she had gone, she had clearly not taken her body with her. What had been her life’s greatest joy? Her greatest sorrow? And on her last days on this Earth, had she looked back with a smile?

I turned my head to admire her whole body. The embalming process smoothed out the wrinkles, but the brown spots of her hands and the arthritic nodes of her fingers gave it all away. It was the body of an old woman; probably a grandmother, a mother, a wife, and certainly a daughter, a friend, a neighbor. Her hands fascinated me to such extent I dreaded the day I would have to put my scalpel to them. Even if it was honoring her last wishes. Her uterus might've brought new life into this world, but her hands had brought the love forward. Hands to hold her children, caress her partner, embrace a friend. Hands to practice her passions, cook meals, write letters, drive places. Hands to make sense out of the one life she had been given. And now, as my gloved-up hands were a mere inch away from hers, life and death juxtaposed, I dared to come back to the one part of her body that made me shiver.

Between the slit of her eyelids, the black pearls glistened back at me. Staring back or not, I looked into them and wondered what they had seen in the span of her life. I imagined she could’ve been a primary school teacher: she had the kind, round face of one, and, even in death, she continued to teach the living. Maybe she had even been one of the teachers to terrify her kids with the blue-eyed men of muscle from the science books. As the black pearls twinkled on and I pictured a life for this woman, the cold loosened its grip around my shoulders and melted away.

Some call the eyes the windows to the soul. Maybe that’s why their presence had brought such uneasiness to my own. But her soul had left this body a long time ago, and so had her eyes.

She wasn’t staring back. Not from those eyes, at least.

And in the eyes of death, I had seen the beauty of a lifetime.

“In place of death there was light.”

Leo Tolstoy.