Letter to a cadaver,
I still remember the first day we’ve met. I felt nostalgic and heavy in a hall full of dead people. I wasn’t sure whether I am about to cut and open up a man who had experienced death. I was just 21 and had never felt, stood or touched anything that close to death.
All of us bowed down on that very day and observed silence for few minutes as a respect to your commitment for our medical education. The feeling that you were loved by someone sometime ago struck my heart very deep.
Despite my curiousity, enthusiasm and eagerness to learn, when my group mates moved the shroud over you, we altogether couldn’t possibly underestand the magnitude of your generiosity and selflessness in donating us your body in to which you have poured whole seventy years of your life with ups and downs and also the very last and only thing that you, truely owned.
Then my professor drew lines on your bear chest and started teaching us. We were told that the best anatomy book is infront of us, awaiting its pages to be turned. When the first incision was made on your bear skin, I felt a shiver running through my spine. I still ponder over whether it was because of the scalpel cutting you open or my hands touching your bear skin for the first time.
Day by day after each and every dissection class, I felt myself gradually brimming with awe, fascination and wonder. Little by little I felt you and your subject transforming me in to a person I have never known. I started reading textbooks and recollecting anatomical relationships instead of prayers before bedtime. I had a roommate constantly complaining me that I was muttering anatomical terms in sleep. I had bones piled up on my work desk and even nicknamed a human skull.
I became a fact-devourer and insidiously I started believing in explainable over unexplainable since I had been down inside your chest and held your heart in my palms. I cut your skull to see your brain inside and in all that I felt that your body is a house in which your soul had once resided. There was nothing left of real you or any part of your virtuous soul anywhere. It was gone, perhaps now in a new home in heaven.
I know not how to be thankful for allowing to discover, explore and learn everything in your earthly home which you have never seen yourself to people whom you have never met, seen or talked in real life. You had no place of yourself there uncut by our novice,unskilled scalpels.
Thank you very much.
Hoping to visit your new home when my time comes,
With lots of love and appreciation,
A dental student.
By Vishva Dissanayake.
Acadora 