There has been nothing for Edith to do in the last few months but stare at the ceiling and think of death. Before her retirement, she’d spent 40 years holding scalpels and forceps, peaking into corpses, and picking them apart. She has held un-beating hearts through her gloved hands, and yet her relationship to death has never been more intimate. Her body is giving in, and it is closing in on her. In her final days she stares at the ceiling and breathes through broken lungs. She replays the steps of an autopsy, imagining the young students who will take her body apart once she is gone.
Edith’s body will be donated, it was the only thing she had insisted on. She had a longdead husband and one child; there was no inheritance to quibble over. When it came to funeral specificities, she told her daughter to go with whatever she wanted. She did not care for song choices or flower arrangements. As her health worsened, she would occasionally humour Fraya and pretend to care. Mainly, it was to give them both something to focus on besides her worsening health. Although after the university was done with her corpse, in a few months or a few years, after they put her through the medical waste incinerator, she could not care less how Fraya chose to dispose of her. The only thing Edith cared about was the donation. So, of course, it was the only thing she and Fraya had truly disagreed on. Fraya did not want to wait for her mother’s ashes. She was sentimental, she wanted the closure of scattering ashes into the sea, like she had with her father’s.
But Edith remains so grateful to the donors she studied in university. Before autopsies had become routine, there was morbid curiosity when she found a piece of their story; an extended stomach, a missing kidney, a metal implant. She remembers gossiping with other students about the colour of a cadavers’ lungs or the undigested pills in their stomach. It was insensitive, they knew even then, to be so casual about the organs on the slab. But Edith learnt that it was a necessary catharsis. You cannot see so much death without becoming comfortable with it, even nonchalant. In a way, although Edith never told Fraya, donating felt like a kind of atonement. There would be no shame in the apathy with which she’d handled her autopsies. If she was not too prudish to put her own body on the same slab she’d once worked at.
What would be done with Edith’s body was one of the last arguments they’d had. Eventually, the old woman was too weak to speak and too pitiful to argue with.
“I don’t want some teenagers cutting you open, mum,” Fraya had insisted.
“Oh, they’ll be well into their twent-” Edith tried to tease, but a coughing fit interrupted her. Fraya patted her mother’s back until the coughing stopped and dropped the subject.
That was perhaps the worst of it, her daughter’s unwavering kindness. It was so unlike the smart-mouthed argumentative woman Edith knew. Fraya no longer took excuses to bicker. Now she doted on her mother, treated her as if she was fragile.
Edith quickly learned that there was much more dignity in being dead than in dying. She thought of her patients and their quick, sudden deaths. She began to envy the ones with water-logged lungs, deep lacerations, blocked arteries. Deaths both painful and quick. Her own death had been a slow torture. Dying from cancer had no glamour; it was dried crust of drool on her chin, vomit stains on her clothes. It was drinking water through straws and shitting into adult diapers. She had been bed-bound for three months and hadn’t slept a full night in at least two weeks. When she manages to drift off, she coughs herself awake, spitting blood and phlegm onto herself, too weak to wipe herself clean. Ugly tumours colonise her body. Chunks of mutated cells spread though the spongy branches of her lungs, they choked her from the inside out. What a fascinating scene her body will be post-mortem.
The prognosis had been six months to a year - she’d made it one year and three months before her heart gave out. In the night, kept awake by coughing fits, she watches the ceiling when her shallow breaths slow to nothing. One final, sharp sting rings out in her chest as her lungs deflate. Her diaphragm and abdomen relax. Her blood stops flowing. A pleasant sting like the final edges of pins and needles goes to her underside as her blood pools downwards into her back and legs. For a while, death feels like relief; every muscle softens, her body is hollow and still. It is in this soft paralysis that she begins to wait. Time passes, breathless and silent. And nothing comes. No light. No dreamless sleep. No ‘sweet release’. Her eyes, unable to blink, begin to sting and then burn. Her skin grows tight and dry, and the blood pooling down to her underside swells her veins. Death begins to hurt.
Fraya finds her in the morning. Daylight has snuck in through the gaps where the curtains do not quite meet the edge of the window. Edith can see it lighten the room through her now-blurred vision. By this time, Edith’s muscles have begun to dry and harden. She cannot turn when she hears her daughter’s steps. She could not beg her for help. Fraya places her hand under her mother’s nose, when she feels no breath, she cries out for her mother. Her grief comes from deep in her stomach and comes out as strangled sobs.
Edith listens helplessly. A strange, still kind of heartbreak moves through her; no tension in her chest, no stomach drop and no tears. Instead, just a surge of panicking thoughts. Her mind was stuck in a rotting body. She had already waited one torturous night for release. Will it stop when her nerves dissolve? Will she feel each piece of her as it breaks down? She silently screamed, begged, she repented for every sin. She prayed to a god she had never prayed to before. She longed for the familiar pain of cancer.
Freya placed a gentle warm hand on her mother’s eyes. When she dragged her hand down, the inside of Edith’s eyelids scraped against a layer of dust and debris from the night. Tiny particles felt like shards of glass on her corneas. Edith heard one half of a phone conversation, Fraya’s voice was still weak and strained.
“Auntie? I’m so sorry she…Yes, I found her this morning…okay, thank you,”
Soon, Edith’s skin will dry out completely, stiffen and break at the seams. Her cuticles will shrink back, her scalp will split at the roots of her hair follicles. It will itch, then sting, then burn.
“No, I haven’t called them…yes, yes…”
Was this what it was like? For every patient she’d placed on the slab. A career’s worth of cadaver flash through her mind. Their pale skin, blue veins visible through the thin skin of their closed lids.
“In the night…no, no she… she looks very peaceful,”
Edith longed for air in her lungs, for blood in her veins, she begged for a body which could still scream.