The Morgue

It was dusk when I walked into the morgue: a white-washed squat building that sat next to a public park just by the sea. I rang the bell at the counter and waited with my little bag of swabs and vials.  The place appeared deserted; it was near closing time. A mortuary assistant eventually appeared and nodded when I introduced myself and told him that I was there to collect the specimens. “This way, doctor,” he said and led me through what seemed like a rough-and-ready operating theater gowning area. 

“Do you still have the organs?” I asked, as we walked along, more to break the silence than from any sincere desire to know. 

“No, we did the autopsy four days ago. All the organs are at the histology lab,” and then, “Well, here she is.”

She lay on a metal gurney, fourteen years old and remarkably lifelike except for a heart that had stopped beating under mysterious circumstances in the middle of a family barbecue five days ago. I stopped short, mentally wilting from my task. “I’ll leave you to it, doctor. Just give me a shout if you need anything,” said my companion as he began walking away. I wanted to scream at him to stay by my side and not leave me alone with her, but I confined myself to a whispered thanks. 

Most doctors think they are used to death. They are not. Their sporadic brushes with death occur in the midst of a chaotic, grieving, suffering, screaming, but always thriving current of life. It is the morgue that truly teaches you what death looks like. There are no wailing relatives here, no hopeless hiss of oxygen masks, no blinking alarms on the cardiac monitor registering a continuously moving flat line. Necropolis. There was nothing amiss about a fourteen-year-old lying here, looking as if she would wake at any moment. It could have been anyone, really.  

I slowly unwrapped the nasopharyngeal swab. She lay there watching me. I inserted the swab into her nostril. I fully expected her to leap up and grab my wrist, to snort and sneeze, to wrench the swab away from me and fly away into the heavens leaving me sprawling on the tiled floor. But nothing happened. I removed my swab. Old blood. Spirit? It went into the vial with the pink liquid. I then unscrewed the second swab to obtain a throat swab. Here, at last, there was something, the immensely powerful passive resistance of rigor mortis. Some more dried saliva and old blood. I had all I needed. I stepped away, struggling for apathy and finding it more easily than I would have wished for. The mortuary assistant waved goodbye and wheeled the gurney back into the depths. 

I walked out of the mortuary. Back in my car, I carefully labelled the samples and wrote down the test requests on the pink lab form. 

The sun had set. The basketball courts were busy today.