October 7th, 2009

I have so much to say I don’t know where and how to begin. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this experience. Going to the medical examiner has changed my outlook on life forever. My reaction surprises even me.
Unlike my classmates, I was not nervous at all. I was actually excited about seeing an autopsy. Back when I was completing my first bachelor, I wanted to be a pathologist.​ Somehow I was fascinated with death and finding what its cause. God totally changed the course of my life, and although in the pass I’ve whined and complained about that, I could not be happier today. It’s very interesting how clinical I was about being in the lab, seeing a decomposing body, pocking my fingers thru his aorta or finding his coronary arteries. I even wanted to stitch him up. I supposed for the little time we were there, I did become that pathologist.​ I noticed just about everything about the body, even his cherry tattoo that no one else saw. The smell and temperature was more bearable than I expected. I did not experience any nausea or was not grossed out at all.
Everything changed for me after the actual autopsy. Sitting in the waiting room and seeing all the suicide cases that were processed touched me more than I expected. Never in all my life, had I felt so close to something so ugly and real. It was even more disturbing to learn that there are books teaching methods of suicide and even worse to learn that a company in Canada sells kits. How is this stuff legal?  Why are people so concerned about Gay rights, Roe v. Wade, taking prayer out of schools, but pay no attention to the number of suicidal people living in our communities?​ Or allowing companies to give them the means to kill themselves? Why is suicide legal? I was and still am angry and sad about it. It will never cease to amaze me how we major in the trivial and minor in the essential. Sitting there in the classroom, I became acutely aware of how much we care about things of no value. The media does a great job of reminding us to eat right, exercise every day, and etc…. but what about our minds, hearts and souls. Where’s the diet for that? We keep forgetting that at the end of it all, we are dust and to dust we shall return. That poor decaying body displayed before a group of students, was once a man, with a job, friends, family, etc… But there he was laid out the same way he came into this world. All the things he worked for, all the degrees, the possessions,​ the friends, the family, everything he valued stayed behind. He came with nothing, he left with nothing.
I think I am now forever scarred. For some odd reason my mind will randomly picture people I know on that autopsy table with their skull exposed. It has happened so often now that it doesn’t spook me out anymore. I don’t think I ever want any of my love ones to get an autopsy. All in all, going to the medical examiner was more than a clinical experience for me. It was a spiritual journey in which I realize that I need to reset my priorities on things that matter the most in this life, my relationship​ with Jesus-Christ​.

Born an Old Soul into a New World, I have evolved into a contradictio​​n...fierce but gentle, meek but proud, vengeful and forgiving, rigidly flexible I am ... patient while demanding, giving and taking, sanctified and sassy both cold and warm I am... I use both left and right, good and bad, insensitivel​​y sentimental,​​ calmly wild, insanely smart, a helpless romantic, demure but bold... I am more than a man: Woman, I am!

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