It started out a normal day, for a Saturday. No rush about getting going (other than the mandatory cat-feeding as soon as I can wobble to the kitchen and open the can), I didn't have to be anywhere at any particular time, I didn't even have to get out of my pajamas until I was good and ready (which some days is the next morning). I was working on the latest biography project and struggling with getting the formatting done first rather than last (which I did last time and swore I'd never do it that way again). Just a normal Saturday, toasted bread and cheese for breakfast and then back to the book.
Then the phone rang.
It was a friend of mine, not one I know exceptionally well but one I have known for a few years. They were calling to see if I'd like to go with them to an exhibition called "Body Works" at the Arizona Science Center. At 8:55 on a Saturday morning they want to go see cadavers and body parts who have been plastinated, carved up, dissected and posed. Did I want to go? Heck, why not? Beats doing housework, getting cat food and the haircut that can wait until next week. Lord knows, I'm not the spontaneous type but this time I decided what the heck and went with it.
The exhibition was fascinating. Yes, subconsciously I knew these had once been living, breathing people who had willed their bodies for scientific study and education of both physicians-in-training and lay people. The texture, however made it seem more like an infinitely painstaking carving -- until I noticed the lips, bits of hair, eyelashes and eyebrows. Somehow then it was easy to remember the humanity that had been theirs. Still, they gave a look at a human body that most people would never see, much less pay to see. It was an exercise in seeing how very intricately formed and made we are, how the multitudes of parts all work together, how absurdly tiny some things are (like the bones of the inner ear and the capillaries around the head and face), and even what the sciatic nerve that causes so much pain actually looks like in place. There were embryos representing how they grow from about 4 weeks' gestation (when they're about the size of a newly-hatched fly larva) up through full term. even at 12 weeks, three months' gestation, they're still smaller than a long fingernail. From these very tiny beginnings each human being comes, no shortcuts, no detours. It's mind-boggling.
I wasn't too sure about how well I could handle an exhibition of this type; I'd tried to go through the medical museum at the Smithsonian back in my teens but could only go a little way before it overwhelmed me and I had to leave. This exhibition, though, made me think about how it all works together, what can go wrong, and what it looks like when it goes wrong. I saw the lungs of a smoker and realized that mine probably look about like that. Gallstones? So that's what they looked like before the surgeon took them out for me. A fetus at 38 weeks? No wonder it felt like my son was using my bladder for a soccer ball and my ribs for punching bags. this exhibition wasn't just about someone's search for art in strange places but about who we are, including me and this person and that person, the guy in the wheel chair, the child with the big eyes, the medical- and pre-med students comparing notes, and even some elderly people looking at their diseases as they appeared in someone else's body.
Under the wrapping of skin that makes us look different from our sibling, our next-door neighbor or the guy halfway around the world, we're all very much the same. Remove the skin and it's hard to tell one person from another. Yet we don't look at the inside, the similarities; we look at the skin, the shape of the eyes, the color of the hair, the shade of the skin and make judgments about them based on those characteristics.
Why would anyone want to be displayed this way, to be carved up and shown in odd ways? Immortality, of sorts? As a curiosity factor? A postmortem narcissism? Who knows. When I look a them, though, I remember the words of the Psalmist, "For you created my innermost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."(Ps. 139:13-14)
I didn't realize the bones of the middle ear were so small, yet look at what they do to enable us to hear the sounds of music, the voices of loved ones, the cry of the oppressed. Just moving a finger requires a number of muscles plus nerves and blood vessels. Think of eating an ice-cream cone. Think of each separate action that has to happen to get the ice cream from the cone in the hand to raising it to the lips and then the tongue extending to take a long swipe at the cool treat as the hand holds it up to the mouth. Every action requires so much that I never think about, I just do it.
For I am fearfully and wonderfully made ---- no matter what I think my physical flaws are, or my deficits, or even my unrealistic expectations of what I should be or look like.
For I am fearfully and wonderfully made --- and it took some plastinated and dissected cadavers in various poses and with various structures pointed out, to make me remember that.
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