Copyright © 2005 by Blake Charlton. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reposting, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission of the author.
I saw my first dead stranger last week.
It wasn't the first body I'd ever seen. When my grandfather passed away sixteen years ago, I was terrified of him. The service was closed casket, but my mother led me up to grampa during the viewing. I remember the coffin reaching almost up to my chin. It was hard to peer inside. I remember opening my eyes as wide as they would go, but it felt as if I couldn't open them wide enough.
And yet I have not memory of seeing my dead grand father.
I think back and I see my boyhood self, my mother above me, her hands on my shoulders, my father beside her. I'm peering into to the casket, but inside there is only darkness so thick it seems liquid. The blackness sloshes slightly, side to side.
My grandmother's death, twelve years later, was different. Grandma's image rests firmly in my mind--a 95 year old woman, wrinkled, bent by dorsal kyphosis, her lips so thin as to become mere curtains for her teeth. I was twenty-four; I felt no fear or estrangement, only a dull sadness. For the past five years, Alhemizer's had been slowly wrapping grandma in spidery gauze-that's a strange metaphor, I know, but there's no other way I can explain the strangeness of watching her once bright mind fade away.
Seeing my dead grandmother was a sad but personal experience. It wasn't a dead body; it was a shell, the beginning of a last memory. She was returning to the earth. So it was in the beginning, so it shall be in the end.
But last week, I stared at a stranger's expertly cut sternum. In my newly pressed, black linen suit, I shivered in an anatomy lab's chill formaldehyde fumes. There were three others with me; all were dressed in conservative black. Interview day for a medical school.
When touring the lecture halls and the hospital wards, we had been a chatty crowd, pleased to be interviewing so early at such a wonderful school. There had been a little uncouth probing, pre-med attempts to size up the competition. Now all that had stopped.
Most hands went into pockets or grasped each other. We were staring at a dead man. Our guide removed the shutter-like lattice of ribs and intercostal muscles. Before us lay the chest cavity; the stranger's heart resembled nothing so much as a wad of brown leather.
For me--and I suspect for my peers--it was the first visceral realization that we really were going to become doctors. Until then all of the essays, interview questions, had provoked merely intellectual responses. We were all ready to logically define our motivations, our goals, our reasons for choosing medicine. But we had not truly known what it would mean to feel our motivations.
This man had donated his body to advance medical science. He had entrusted himself to students, strangers like us.
It was a feeling of solemnity and understanding that filled me then. I don't know if the others felt it too; I think they did…or perhaps they had previously come to this emotional realization.
Interviewers always ask me why I want to go into medicine now that I've become a published novelist. They always ask in a sober, subdued tone--almost as if they're sad.
For the first time I understood this emotional gravity. The call to healing is not a gentle master. It cannot be partially obeyed; it requires complete commitment and acceptance. Just as this stranger's preserved heart lying still before me commanded my consummate attention and respect.
When asking me about writing and medicine, the interviewers feared that my interest in fiction, my desire to write adventure stories, would be mutually exclusive with the desire to pursue an MD. They felt that either my pleasure in art or my passion for healing would have to give way to the other.
The answer I gave then and the answer I would give now are the same. I have not changed my mind or even the words I would use to explain myself. The difference lies in how seeing a dead stranger made me feel the meaning of my words.
Writing fiction for me is an act of healing for both author and reader. I think all authors secretly believe this. Fiction is--to borrow from Wordsworth--an attempt to "see into the life of things", to show the world in a different way. Weather we read Homer in the original Greek or the trashiest comic book imaginable, we see through other eyes. We understand different modes of morality, of empathy, of passion.
I write about magical worlds primarily because it's fun. And I hope my readers will find in my work before all else excitement and adventure. But I could not commit myself to such a pursuit if I did not, in my heart of hearts, believe that it was meaningful and helpful.
I imagine medicine will at times be fun. I imagine more often that it will be difficult, maybe even agonizing. But, like writing, I believe that above all else it will be both meaningful and helpful.
So far, it seems this answer has satisfied my interviewers. They usually nod when I'm done and move on to a far easier question: "But medicine and writing both demand a great amount of time and effort. What personal qualities will you draw upon to find the wherewithal to peruse both?"
"Stubbornness," I saw without pause, "lots and lots of stubbornness."