My grandmother’s eyes were still open. That’s what I remember most from the morning we arrived in Hyderabad. Her body lay on a metal slab, silent, still, waiting for us to finish what life had started.
A Hindu funeral is unlike any other. It starts with the cremation at the mahāprastānam (lit. great journey), and the antyeṣṭi (last sacrifice) lasts twelve days after. 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 at the mahāprastānam. 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 the cremation had waited for us – me and my dad – to fly in. Our delay kept her soul tethered I was told. And to have properly honored it, it would have been much better to have cremated her right away, to have liberated her ātma immediately. But now she had wait for our arrival to be freed – the remaining soul wrested from body.
As the other men of my family and I carried my grandmother to the funeral pyre, our feet scalding on the blistering granite flooring, I read, etched in cast stone pillars, a passage from the Gītā:
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
-
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. 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 suprasternal 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 had thought I understood, but now felt inescapably true: that life isn’t that which animates the body. It is what gives it meaning, the perciever.
-
I remembered something I’d once read in college: the ancient Sanskritists believed that the use of specific language articulated universal truths. Specifically, they demonstrated that because you could use a personal possessive pronoun (my) to describe any aspect of your experience, that those aspects must belong to you and were not the same as you.
For example:
So what am I? What else is left?
Maybe what I am is the mere fact of perception; experience itself – the contents of which have nothing to do with me. Which are so deeply out of my control, they can be changed with drugs, lies, dreams and any number of neurological manipulations. The ancient Hindus would call 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 about dissection. 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 in which they lie.
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. An organ just for us. Or at the very least, a sign. But they come up short every time. For the body simply is just blood, guts, and viscera.
I have come to reject all of these perspectives. I know the body is necessary to host life, and it is how that life is permitted to interact with the material world, but now I also know that 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 affect what is displayed, but the movie is the story told – it exists beyond the screen.
But the canvas matters. The body matters. It is the vessel by which the external world is transduced to the witness. 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 uncover a little more of our man – how he lived, what he carried. A scar, a stain, the weight of a memory left in the body.
I know I don’t need to lament over violating this man’s body. But I do need to lose sleep over making sure I honor it. And so I study, I learn, and I cut carefully.