Teaching with Tim

 

I stand in front of an open doorway beyond which I see white body bags laid out on tables.  In a moment, they will let us inside. But first a small Indian woman, fifty some years old and wearing a knee-length white lab coat, gives us the guidelines:

“This is a place of respect,” she says.  “No photography of any kind.”

A muffled murmur of disappointment passes through the fifty Redondo Beach high schoolers.  I am surprised.  Do these kids think that the University of Southern California is letting them dig through dead bodies so that they can take poloroids to gross out their friends?

“All cell phones must be turned off,” our guide continues.  “If you feel that you need to leave for any reason, just make your way to the exit.  Do not feel that you need to ask permission.  Just go.”

Some students exchange half-smiles and knowing looks.  I hear one girl say that her dad once saw a cadaver. It made him sick and gave him nightmares for weeks. 

I am not exactly scared, but I am anxious.  I have never seen a real dead body before, and I am not entirely sure why I am here.  Back at Southeast Middle School, my students are taking a quiz with a substitute.  My health professor offered our Loyola Marymount Graduate class the opportunity to come with his high school students on “The Cadaver Field Trip” at USC’s satellite anatomy and chiropractic school.  I am apparently the only grad student who took him up on the offer.  One high school girl asked if I went to her school, and she seemed surprised when I told her that I was a teacher.  It’s true that physically, I’m not that different from them—they’re seventeen or eighteen, and I’m twenty-two.  They are a well-behaved and well-mannered group, but I do sense a psychological distance between myself and them that belies our closeness in age.  I don’t think this would have been true even one or two years ago, but I now feel that I can understand them, but I can’t really relate to them. I no longer feel that mix of social anxiety and hormone-driven confusion that defines this age group. It reveals itself in logo-plastered T-shirts, multiple ear-piercings, loud bubble gum popping, and herd-like social behavior.  But I still feel a strong solidarity with these unknown high school students for the moment.  We are all about to meet death in person, and our anxiety brings us together without regard for petty differences.

“You will enter in three groups of fifteen.  There are three stations: the cadaver station, the brain station, and the embryo station.  When you arrive at your station, please put on your gloves and then take a seat at a stool.”  

I let the first group of fifteen file in ahead of me, then slip in with the second group.  The guide directs us to the “cadaver station.”

The room is lit with fluorescent lights, and is generally designed like an over-sized high school chemistry lab, complete with sinks and emergency showers.  The smell of formaldehyde and other chemicals is pungent but not overpowering—just a strong cumin and bleach perfume that hangs in the air. 

I don’t realize I’m at the body until it is right in front of me.  An overweight woman.  Her face is covered with a white tarpaulin, as are her legs, and only the area between her waist and shoulders is exposed.  The skin is so white and lifeless that at first I can’t see how it bears any relation to the living skin that covers my own body.  There is a thin black incision running from her collar bone to the base of her abdomen.  This is where the medical student will open her up for us.   The sight is not horrific.  It is not revolting.  It is not even sad.  It is just real— harshly, unapologetically real.  This is a dead body, I think.  This is what all of us will become.

The medical student is just a few years older than me, but he carries himself with professionalism worthy of a doctor as he gives us a tour of the woman’s body, layer by layer.  First he lifts off her skin and discusses its functions and attributes.  Next, he lifts off what looks like a three-inch layer of yellow foam mattress cushioning.  Fat. 

He has to repeatedly quell the students’ wide-eyed questioning. 

“How did she die?” one girl asks.

“In the interest of time, please save questions for the end.”

He pulls out her heart.  It is extremely large, at least as big as three adult fists, and it is blanketed with yellow layers of fat.  The medical student explains that there are two categories of heart enlargement: healthy and unhealthy.  This woman’s falls into the latter category, since it was caused by excess fat, not athletic exertion. 

He continues through all the layers of her body, showing us the pancreas, the rib-cage, the lungs, the stomach, and intenstines peppered with pasty globules of fat.  All the while he is giving basic lessons in human anatomy. 

“Right,” he says, “so the next steps in the digestive process are small intestine, large intestine, anal sphincter, and then—for you football fans out there—send the Browns to the Superbowl… get it?”

The students laugh a little, but the medical student gets his biggest crowd reaction without even asking for it. 

“And this,” he says, reaching with both hands deep into the cavity of the woman’s stomach, “is her liver.” 

He pulls out an absolutely massive object.  It is as wide as her entire body and nearly as large in the other direction.  Although the liver is the second largest organ in the human body, we learn that this woman’s liver is nearly four times the size it should be.  Liver cancer is what killed her.   

The medical student gives us several of her organs to pass around (but not the lungs, because they are still too “juicy”), and then takes volunteers to “put her back together.” 

“Any of you guys ever played Tetris?” he asks.

The woman’s body is quickly reassembled, and we continue to the next two stations, handling brains, spinal cords, eyeballs, and uteruses.  We see a real fetus, preserved in a jar, at each stage of its development, from two weeks to nine months.  The medical student tells us that the school acquired these fetuses from a scientist who was studying DNA in the 1940s.  After the scientist unexpectedly died, his wife found these jars in the garage and donated them to the school.  And here they are, floating in clear preservative as if removed from the womb only minutes ago. 

“They could be my Grandma,” one girl says.

            The small doctor who introduced us to the facility passes around a small brown box containing the preserved fetus of a stillborn child.  Seeing this dead body is not like seeing the body of the woman.  A lump forms in my throat when I look at its crumpled little brown body. 

            A bell soon chimes, telling us that the next group of visitors—medical students from UCLA—has arrived, and our time is up.  My health professor takes a group of students for one last look through the cadaver, and I follow.  He quickly “unpacks” the parts of the woman again, and lets students handle them and pass them around.  The students seem to have gotten over their initial qualms now, and they are handling human organs with impressive seriousness and academic interest.  As a learning experience, the field trip is an obvious success.  The students are mimicking the calm, detached interest of their teachers and studying the body like scientists, not like Stephen King fans. 

Yesterday I was sure seeing a cadaver would change me as a person somehow.  I thought I would be one person before and another person after.  I examine myself, and I find that this is true, but not in the way I thought it would be.  I originally chose to go on this field trip to have an authentic “life experience,” something that would fuel my philosophical fires, giving me new perspectives on the meaning of death.  But when I think of recapturing this experience, of trying to tell others what it meant to me, only one adjective comes to mind: real.  What I saw was real.  We are all matter–we are all organs and blood and guts and little yellow globules of fat stuck to the end of a small intestine.  My mind still rebels at this thought, telling me, “Yes, technically, but not really–I am this, but I am more than this.”  And even if I left the logos and bubble gum behind, I am still unwilling to let go of the high schooler inside me who whispers “you are immortal.” 

But now I remember a heart the size of four fists, skin the color of glue, and a baby curled up in a box.  And I wonder if maybe this is the only time we have.