वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय
नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि |
तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णा
न्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही ||२२||
Just as a person sheds worn-out clothes and dons new ones, at death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters another. BG 2.22
I have only seen death twice in my life. Once was in my grandmother and once in a stranger.
When my grandmother died, I was asked to fly out to India with my father to carry out her services.
A Hindu funeral is unlike any other. It takes place outside in a location called a mahāprastānam (lit. great journey). The antyeṣṭi (last sacrifice) involves a complex set of rituals over twelve days of mourning.
And the Indian summer is unlike any other. The dry Hyderabad sun penetrated the nape of my neck as I looked across my grandmother’s body. It lay still on a metal slab on the ground on the hot granite, eyes open and gray.
“We couldn’t close them.” I overhear.
It had been several days since my grandmother’s passing but they had yet to cremate her body. The family was waiting for the rest, including me and my dad, to fly in from across the globe. This is deeply frowned upon - it’s much better to cremate someone right away, to liberate their soul immediately. Only after we arrived could she finally be freed - the remaining soul wrested from body. As me and the other men of my family carried my grandmother to the funeral pyre, our feet scalding on the blistering granite flooring, I read, etched in cast stone pillars, that passage from the Bhagavad-Gītā.
- - -
Now, as a first year medical student in my fifth month of school, I have seen another body. This time a stranger who did not know me and now who cannot know me.
They don’t say enough before giving you a cadaver in medical school. They don’t tell you how to (or not to) feel. They don’t tell you to take a breath. They don’t tell you that the head, hands, and feet will be wrapped and covered in plastic bags. They don’t tell you that the person’s body will still have chest hair. They don’t tell you, and I’m glad they don’t.
Not many words can prepare you to witness a body lying lifeless and none are needed. Seeing death evokes a deeply human response. You just stare.
And then they tell you to cut.
My group stared at a single scalpel laying on this man’s sternum. I picked it up and ran it from his jugular notch to his xiphoid process - all the while a part of me expected a reaction. A little “ouch.” Or a bagged hand to stop my blade. It didn’t.
Then I realized something. Something I thought I understood before but viscerally experience now: that life is a necessary element of being human. That this body which lay in front could not be a man, just his body, now left behind.
- - -
Ancient Sanskritists thought they had the world understood with language. They showed elegantly that because you could use a personal possessive pronoun (my) to describe any aspect of your experience, that those aspects belong to you and were not the same as you.
For example:
So what am I? What else is left?
They suggested that what you are is the mere fact of perception; that you are simply experience itself - the contents of which have nothing to do with you. Which are so deeply out of your control, they can be changed with drugs, lies, dreams and any number of neurological manipulations. They called this pure awareness “sākṣi,” the witness.
- - -
This was what I saw. I saw a body with no experience. No transduction of the external world into qualia. No one to bear witness. Whoever owned this body no longer was tied to it. It had been shed as old clothes described so many years ago in the Gītā. And though I don’t know whether the life force that once occupied these remains assumed a new set, I do know, for certain, that it no longer resides here.
I’ve heard many perspectives from friends and fellow medical students. For many, the feeling of cutting open a cadaver is uneventful, as if disassembling a pen in a boring English class and painstakingly putting it back together while the professor drones on about Eliot.
For some, the act of dissecting a body is an affront to nature - close to, but distinct from, violence. Though there is a noted lack of gore and the cuts we make are planned and painstaking, it is brutal nonetheless. Separating ligament from fascia from muscle is brutal. It is a denial of humanity to take a knife to another. At the very least, it feels like a violation of the sacred oath of physicians to separate organ from organ with no intention in helping the body from which they originate.
For others still, dissection comes as a surprise. They hope, as they cut, to find something to prove the exceptionalness of humanity. To separate life from the material world. But they come up short every time. For the body simply is just blood, guts, and viscera.
I reject all of these perspectives. Though the body is necessary to host life, and is how that life is permitted to interact with the material world, it should not be conflated with life itself. Just as a projector screen is necessary to watch a movie but has nothing at all to do with the content of the movie. Undoubtedly, changes in the surface of the canvas would effect what is displayed, but the movie is the story told and ultimately isn’t about the canvas.
- - -
This is not an invitation to take the responsibility of dissection lightly. The absence of a homeowner is no excuse to vandalize when house-sitting; the absence of life does not permit mishandling its previous body. And this body is no house. It is the ultimate, and perhaps only true, possession. The very first possession and the very last. A possession that carries with it history and memory. And with each passing week I am privy to more and more of that. As I cut deeper, separating skin from fat, I may learn of his diet. Perhaps when looking at his liver, I’ll see a drink too many. Maybe a cigarette snuck when his kids weren’t looking as I remove his lungs. His last meal when I open his stomach.
No, this realization perhaps puts even more pressure on me to perform. For who gives their most prized belonging for the simple benefit of teaching a stranger? I need not lament over violating this man’s body. But I do need to lose sleep over making sure I honor it. For which I need to observe, to study, to learn, and to cut carefully.