Post-Mortem

After my father's funeral, his ladyfriend Rose said he'd had a good sendoff. I knew what she meant. Piser-Weinstein was packed, hardly an empty seat in the house. The rabbi, unknown to my father but briefed by my brother and me, was warm and well-spoken. He was Rose's rabbi. My father was not observant. The rabbi had graciously met with us the day before the funeral at my father's apartment. I was impressed that he'd make a house call, to strangers no less, and on a Sunday. Tell me about your father, he said. I'd compiled a list of his traits on a yellow legal pad. In the den I read them off. Occasionally my brother and I disagreed. He was contentious, I said. Contentious? What do you mean contentious? Argumentative. Okay, argumentative. The next day the rabbi stood before the assembled mourners. Nate was charming, the rabbi told us. He was funny. Hardworking. Frugal. A stickler. Yes, he could be argumentative. And the mourners, in agreement, laughed. He was, on occasion, hot-tempered. They nodded again. He was a simple man, not ostentatious. He loved his children. He loved the White Sox. He will be missed.

* * *

My father's brain is in a jar. That's how I imagine it. The curly mass squeezed in a Ball jar, sitting on a subterranean shelf somewhere in the basement of Evanston Hospital. I imagine it this way in part because I put it there. My father died on November 25, 1988, at five in the morning, Evanston hospital, Evanston, Illinois, a month after he had a stroke on the Dan Ryan expressway, and I, as one of his two closest living relatives, consented to an autopsy.

There was nothing unusual about my father's death. It was not a medical mystery. He'd had, as one of the residents put it, "a major bleed." To paraphrase another, he'd suffered a medical insult. Or, as he himself said when I entered his cubicle in the emergency room, I had a strake, which felt, as I saw him slipping, no less than that the gods of fate had driven a stake through his heart. There followed a craniotomy, tracheotomy, pulmonary embolism, mucous plug, brain death, pneumonia. But when, four weeks later, in the light of early morning, the attending physician asked, as part of the routine post-mortem protocol, about an autopsy, I felt what I can only call, even after 16 years, a twinge of hope. My father was dead, but maybe the autopsy would explain it.

* * *

The pathologist-cum-essayist F. Gonzalez Crussi, writing about autopsy, talks about "the familiar Y-shaped incision," and I feel a catch in my breathing. Familiar to whom?

Like a would-be scientist I entertain thoughts of discovery, causes, the seat of disease; but like the daughter I really am I blanch at the flash of a blade, the whir of a saw.

Autopsy is a dissection—an invasion—of the human body. If I didn't know that then I know it now.

Then, five-fifteen, five-thirty, the hospital corridor dim, dawn not yet breaking, a bleary-eyed resident asked if we would consent to an autopsy. It was part of his job, his checklist. There were four of us. My brother Gary, his girlfriend Jill, my lover Ann, me. We were children, all of us, and unaccustomed to making these decisions. We had spent the night at the Holiday Inn, not wanting to leave the hospital, not wanting to stay, a limbo night, awaiting one man's death. We'd asked the nurse to call us when it was time.

* * *

The Holiday Inn looked more like a parking garage than a hotel. The front entrance seemed like the back. The four of us were almost giddy. Two siblings and their lovers spending the night in a hotel together. Did their parents know? An ill-fitting shirt, cheap navy blue tie, the desk clerk was a college student—that's how I assessed him: from Northwestern—and I felt like we were pulling something over on...