It’s winter of my freshman year the first time I touch a dead body.

The face is covered. The limbs are stiff. The air is stale.

I don’t think too deeply about it. 

Death has always gone unspoken in my world. Yes, I realize that at some point everyone will die. And yes, I’ve lowered my friends into the ground, and seen what death was.

But I’ve never touched death. 

There’s little to no warning on our first day of class. One moment, we’re looking over anatomy slides, and the next our, professor is leading us down the hallway and instructing us to put on gloves. The choking smell of formaldehyde is the only real warning.

 Our TAs unzip the thick blue bags and pull back a sheet.

There she is. 

I’m not scared, exactly. Still, it is shocking to see her in front of me and look across the room to the six other donors lying in blue bags. I half expect them to suddenly rise and crawl around like a scene from a horror movie.

But she remains lifeless, face covered in her bag. 

I wonder how she ended up here; why she chose to give her body to us. For now, she doesn’t have a name or a backstory; she is just our donor. She has given one final gift in death. I can only imagine how selfless she was in life. 

We are careful with her, making our way from the outside layers of skin deep into her abdomen and organs. I trace the arteries in her chest, the web of nerves that breaks out from her shoulder, and the muscles in her hand. 

The heart is heavy the first time I hold it. 

It’s the size of my fist, and I’m extra careful not to drop it. Cradled in the palm of my hands, it looks nothing like the cartoon-esque drawings in our textbook. Our TAs instruct us to trace the pathway of the blood flow, pushing their forceps through her superior vena cava and into her right atrium. I look down at my own chest, as if to see the same thing through my rib cage and muscles. 

Our donor had open heart surgery. 

There’s staples sticking out of her sternum and the sutures in the valves of her heart. Feeling the scar, I wonder again how she ended up here. Was it the heart surgery that landed her here? Or was it the heart surgery that gave her extra time?

It’s strangely normal, this whole scene. I go to class, we unzip the bag, we learn and then we leave her. But the smell of the cadaver lab lingers. Sometimes, I believe that it penetrates the fibers of my shoes, the beds of my fingernails, and the roots of my hair. More than once, I catch the smell in my room, a stark reminder of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. 

More recently, I’ve been wondering if I could give a gift as immense as the one she’s given. Could I really offer my body up for strangers to cut open and study? To allow someone else to know my body more intimately than I will ever know it?

I never knew my donor in life, but I did get to learn about her in death.

I don’t know if I could ever do the same. But I do know that, because of her, I now understand a bit more about life after death.