Note: I have recreated conversations (written in italics) from memory. These are not direct quotes but an attempt to capture the gist of what transpired during the workshop. My apologies to anyone in the class who feels misrepresented.

Hypodermic needles unnerve me. Oh, I don’t mind preparing Vitamin B shots for my wife or, when she’s on the verge of a Menier’s attack, filling a 3cc syringe with zincum valerium so that she can calm her blazing nervous system. But watching a long, thin, metal shaft puncture someone’s skin, especially mine, then dive below, well, I can become light headed, even faint. I don’t mind pain, mind you, but I worry that this unmanly sensitivity might carry over to scalpels. I hope not. Tomorrow I will join seventeen Rolfing® Practitioners, massage therapists and an acupuncturist for a week long, eight hours a day, human dissection class.

DAY 1

We meet at 8:30, Monday morning ai Regis College in Westminster, Colorado. After an hour of instructional OSHA videos and quizzes on caustic chemicals, AIDS, and, of course, proper needle disposal, I join the group waiting for our skinny, dark haired leader Gil Hedley, Ph.D., Rolfer. He leads us the short distance from classroom to gross anatomy lab. After inserting a security card and punching in the proper code, he opens the door to a private articles room on the left and another door in front of us. Cool air whooshes past as he works to pull the pressurized door open.

We enter a white, very modern medical room, maybe 30 feet wide by 90 feet long. It looks like a typical college lab; adjustable lights swivel from chrome pipes in the ceiling, stainless sinks line one of the walls, white acoustic tile covers the ceiling and a reddish-brown, poured floor sweeps four inches up all the walls for easy hosing down. What captures our attention, however, are the twelve, 3 x 8 foot gurneys arranged in rows. Nine rest stainless and empty. Stealing looks at the three closed and occupied boxes near the back wall, we grab chairs and adjustable stools with casters and form a circle in the middle of the room.

After walking us through procedural protocol (scalpel blades go in the red sharp’s box hanging on the wall next to the chalk board, body parts from each cadaver go in their own red plastic bag), Gil asks us why we have signed up. We all work with living anatomy on a daily basis, know how it loosens and lengthens under our hands. We want a look inside.

“As more personal reasons emerge, I share mine. We live in a world which assumes that body and psyche are fundamentally separate, that the psyche lives like a ghost in this ‘vessel’, then departs or disappears upon death. I work under the premise that body and soul or psyche, or whatever you want to call it, are inseparable. What better place to explore this inquiry than here.”

Gil draws us close together, knee to knee. Distance born of attempted objectivity fades for a moment. These three people have donated their bodies for our learning. This is a great gift. We will enter their lives deeper than you can imagine, for how they lived and worked and played continues on in their tissue and bones. The medical dissections I have attended tend to be pretty loud and youthful. You remember what college was like. Most of us are now in our late thirties, forties. He raises his hands, palms face ward and inspects them. We use these extremely sensitive tools to take the strain out of peoples’ bodies. If you have a choice between fingers and knives, use your touch to inform and aid you.

He surveys the twelve women and six men circling him with spotless, new lab coats. Some have already pulled on two layers of latex gloves. We approach this process differently than most. Although we will find ourselves quite fascinated by pathology, that isn’t really our goal. You will discover anomalies not covered in any anatomy text. You will have a chance to see and feel how we work on the inside. Be thankful that you don’t have to harden yourselves against years of cancer, abuse, heart attacks and infinite illness like doctors do. Nonetheless, no matter how many times you’ve seen dead bodies on television, meeting one in the flesh can be shocking. You will want to joke, jokes are good. But please don’t joke at the expense of the donors who lie on the tables back there.

A Ph.D. in ethics and training as a Rolfer might be somewhat unusual credentials for obtaining cadavers, but they prove to be ideal for Gil’s purposes. For no matter how removed or ‘clinical’ one approaches dissection, the process lives in the realm of values.

“During the next 6 days you will see and feel things which may make you upset. I guarantee that you will become extremely tired, and not just because of the physical effort it takes to cut and pick down into a body. Take care of yourselves. One other thing. No matter how accustomed you may become to the process taking place in this room, people on the outside won’t find it so palatable.”

He has us close our eyes and offer, each in our own way, a blessing, thanks to the donors in their metal caskets. The room pulses with expectation. Three dead human beings lie in shiny, closed gurneys at the end of the room. Regardless of how many anatomy books we have studied, the real thing challenges us deeply. And on top of crossing into territory protected by ancient taboos against human dismemberment, we mostly stand alone, for few of us know each other. Excitement, fear and uncertainty thicken the air.

We walk to where the donors wait under thin, horizontal windows at the northern end of the room. Gil unlocks the first gurney. Eager hands pull back hinged covers to discover that the first cadaver lies hidden in a blue, plastic body bag. I asked them to leave the bodies exposed. Every facility seems to have their own way of doing things. The group splinters into smaller units. We unlock the remaining two gurneys, releasing full length, curving zippers.

As I pull back the flap of the heavy blue plastic, the concentrated reek of formaldehyde assaults me. Paste white skin which has not seen light for months, runs helter skelter in flat planes. Curves and roundness, once firmed by human activity, have been flattened by embalming fluid and time. Shelves of rubbery skin in three to ten inch long plateaus spread across the woman’s body.

Unfortunately, their heads have all been shaved, Gil offers near by. I prefer to open the boxes to real people. Yet the surrealism softens the impact of meeting a dead human being. No mortuary manipulation draws forth the most handsome features of life. One of the women wore carefully applied rouge and eyeliner when she died. She looks put-together even now. Yet frozen stillness hides the other two cadaver’s humanness. They are easy to keep at a distance, for the moment.

After lunch, teams form around the two women and one man. First we look at their structures, how their bodies worked in space when they were alive. We have to extrapolate, knowing that six months in formaldehyde might form unnatural postural patterns. Are there scars, past surgeries? What do the twists and turns of shoulder girdles, necks, pelvises or legs tell us? How might they have moved or felt? Gil tries to pry back an eyelid and discovers good eye behind. This bodes well for intact brains. I’m excited. Long rivulets, creases in the skin, run shallowly across one woman’s trunk. See these thin straps across her belly button and under her breasts? Here, feel how tough they are. This is where her body worked to maintain her posture. We create all sorts of compensations to manage the stresses and strains of life. Someone palpates a hard, foreign object under her skin just above her right breast. Some kind of port for medicine? Our lady exhibits an abdomen which puffs up hard and to the right, a neck which won’t forget a tilt toward her left shoulder. We find no significant scars, but her body position doesn’t suggest comfort.

Gil, how much of this bloating is due to embalming rather than the way she lived her life?

It’s not always easy to tell, but if there are true strains, they will run deep. All of these people look like they died in a hospital. Who knows how long they lay in bed.

Since we have no names or information about our donors, we make up stories. He might have been a farmer, someone suggests. Look how strong his chest and arms are. Not until the end of the week, during the evisceration of his genitals, are we ready as a group talk about his huge penis. Embalming fluid can tend to distend things, Gil suggests.

Having run our gloved hands over scalp and skin, the cutting moment arrives. Gil picks up a scalpel and slices from the man’s sternum down over his ribs to the side. He then squares the angle by slitting the skin from sternum to belly button. A third cut back down the side outlines a rectangular window. Delicately grasping a corner of skin with a pair of self-locking, medical pliers called a hemostat, Gil gently pulls up and back. I’m a little surprised at my lack of discomfort watching him cut. These people are truly dead, they don’t feel a thing.

“Slice back in toward the skin with your scalpel as you pull so you don’t damage the layer below. See that withtish, cotton candy holding it together? That’s the fascia Ida loved so much.”

Ida Rolf, the founder of Rolfing structural integration, posited decades earlier that the lacy, cotton candy tissue which encases every muscle and nerve fiber, wraps the guts, the heart cavity, indeed, the whole body in a huge, paper thin bag, has a far more critical role in body shape and movement than conventional emphasis on muscles would suggest. Over the week, we find that the stuff runs thin and thick throughout the body, connecting everything in a huge communication network.

Few dissections take the time to remove the skin. Usually, the skin and subcutaneous fascia are peeled off in thick sheathes down to the muscles. We want a good look at the superficial fascia, so before we dive, let’s clear the whole front surface.

Three hours later, I look at the bodies lying yellow and white on the tables. From a distance their general shapes seem unchanged. The layer below turns out to consist mostly of adipose tissue, in other words-fat. We ply our fingers in between tear drops of spongy yellow and white which corrugate the surface. We poke the centers which bulge out slightly in little globular mounds. It’s pretty easy to push down through the stuff to something harder below. Intriguing, and repulsive.

The two women look yellow. Loved those McDonalds, Leland quips. The thin straps we discovered on the surface banding the one woman’s skin replicate themselves at this layer as horizontal, wavy currents of fat. They remain pliable, but we can see the line of strain following her breasts as a permanent, internal bra. This banding which lifts her rib cage must have constricted her breathing somewhat. We speculate on why the man’s thin layer of fat appears white at this stage of disrobing. We find ourselves wondering how much of this stuff we each hide away below the mask of our own skin.

Fat’s been given a bad name. I wonder if his skinny boniness gives Gil a slightly different take on fat than those of us who struggle with middle age bulge. Everyone, to greater and lesser degrees, has this layer. It is essential for, among other things, regulating temperature. Don’t underestimate it.

I arch the strain out of my tired back as I move away from Lucy. Names have been given. “Red” for his fine red hair. “Eve” for her beauty and calm. “Lucy” for I don’t know why. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucille Ball-respect, but nothing very concrete.

After washing the yellow formaldehyde juice off my gloves and stripping them into the waste basket, I scrub my sweat soaked skin to rid it of the necrotic smell. Now that the intense concentration required to sever skin from fat has been accomplished, exhaustion drags my body into a stupor. I stand back from the three cadavers, taking them in one by one. The mixture of horrid smell and mutilating bodies disturbs me in a place where words don’t visit. In my gut, my heart, I can’t tell. But the scene, regardless of how commonplace it may be in medical facilities around the world, feels intrinsically revolting. And yet, the macabre process of working our fingers down into layers of death seems to promise something important. Even as I feel relief at leaving the intensity of the lab, my mind refuses to release the extraordinary images of the day. To have seen inside a human being, to truly comprehend what our innards are like under the disguise of clothes, makeup and expression changes how I now feel about both myself and my fellow humans.

DAY 2

How did you all faire last night? Any dreams? Gil sets the tone for the week; information about muscle, organ and bone isn’t the only type of knowledge sought.

All I could see was skin being peeled back from the layer below.

I couldn’t believe how tired I was. Fat, everywhere I saw fat.

When Kathy told us the first day that she dreaded doing another dissection, I don’t think I really understood, I say. I think I was just trying to cope with experiencing and cutting into a dead body. Dread couldn’t be a better description of what I feel now.

“I want to address the question of body and psyche brought up yesterday, Gil jumps in. The way I see it, the body is like a dance, the psyche the dancer. When the dancer starts the dance, she becomes it, fully and completely. For that moment the two are inseparable. But when the dance is over, the dancer moves on.”

Beautiful metaphor. And impossible to prove. But in that moment it feels fitting. Contemplating philosophical themes in a medical laboratory seems incongruous, but dismembering a human being pushes us past analysis and abstraction and into questions of meaning, of life and death.

We talked for hours last night. Acupuncturist Jeffrey Dann and Rolfers Leland Everett and Rebecca Lux, who practice in Hawaii, commute to class every day from Jeffrey’s house in Boulder. His knowledge of acupuncture and Chinese medicine intrigues me.

Can you see yet how the character of these people travels with them down past their skin? Gil’s broad interest leads us into discussions about anatomy one moment then to philosophical implications the next. Their strain and suffering don’t stop at the surface. I think about the hard, foreign object we had palpated above Eve’s right breast. It turned out to be a Hickman line which runs down into a large vein near her heart. Chemotherapy seems likely now. For a woman who had a semi-permanent plastic tube running into her body, Eve certainly appears unflustered.

“The yellow and white subcutaneous fascial layer is actually quite important to the Chinese. It’s called the wei qui. It’s where the energy of personal protection resides. Poor strength in this layer leaves people very susceptibleand weak.”

Today we strip away the subcutaneous fascia, which some of you less enlightened like to call fat’. You’ve all studied anatomy so this should be familiar territory. Before we head over, let’s take a moment as a group to settle in. This process gets more intense the further down we go and the more cohesive we are the better we will do. We close our eyes for the moment of ritual silence.

The massive air purifying system doesn’t have much access to the embalmed bodies lying in formaldehyde over night. As we fold back the hinged, metal covers, concentrated stench gushes out. The sight of a body with nothing but raw, subcutaneous fat shocks me. Smell and sight wedge into my mind as a single, horrid unity.

We go to work with a confidence and enthusiasm missing yesterday. We know this terrain. Leland starts on Lucy’s left shoulder and arm. Jeffrey works the right thigh while Rebecca begins to separate the muscles on the right leg. B.J. takes scalpel to head with Alex working alongside her. We leave the right armand left leg alone-we might want to cross-section later.

I find myself perched to the side of Lucy’s abdomen. I begin with the long, rectus abdominis muscles which extend from the bottom of her sternum to the top of her pubes. The ‘six pack’, with its tendinous inscriptions and bulging muscles my son points out on weight lifter’s stomachs, shows itself as a flat, thin muscular layer in this elderly woman. I succeed in reverse scissoring it free but find myself in a quandary about the slanting internal oblique muscles and the horizontal transverse abdominis which protects the deep abdominal cavity. They are so thin and glued together that I can’t tell them apart. Gil comes over and teases free a point of entry with his hemostat. The whole abdominal layer is literally paper thin, and, like paper, easy to tear.

I gladly forget the whole as I lose myself in this extremely fine excavation. In three to four hours I cover an area maybe 9 inches wide by 12 inches long by 1 /8 of an inch deep. Finally, I free the belly muscles enough that I see the abdominal peritoneum as a distinct bag surrounding the intestines and reproductive organs. Layers become so thin and continuous that I poke a small hole into the cavity by mistake. I take a break.

I look over with envy at Jeffrey who has parted all the muscles in Lucy’s thigh. Although the anatomical truth of seeing each muscle float independently of its neighbors presents a beautiful display of human order, it deceives us. In our analytical quest, we tend to forget that no muscle can function properly without the synergy of the whole group. Nonetheless, we take turns shuffling down through Lucy’s upper leg, holding each quad muscle in hands which have never felt such isolation.

Leland has worked up into the rich intersection of the armpit where tributaries of muscle, blood vessel and nerves criss-cross in every which direction. Earlier he had freed the muscles of the forearm well enough that he could pinch, but not actually see, the white cross fibers of the interosseus membrane which ties the two long bones of the forearm together.

The day closes with no great surprises. We stand back from a Lucy who wears her arms and legs in spindly disorder. She has half a neck and wears a cranium which shines from lack of skin. Most of the pieces stay tied to her but the glue, the fascia which binds one muscle to the next, has been erased in many areas. She has been exploded into extraordinary, unreal detail so that we can see how she works. I’m struck again by how remarkable a choice this woman made to offer her body to our science.

Her slow disintegration continues to undermine my exuberance for the primal terrain we explore. The dark magnet of her disappearing body draws and pushes me away simultaneously. Why is this process so enthralling?

After showering and dressing, my cohort Pamela and I head toward Boulder. Loud blues on the car stereo try to vanquish the morbid images of muscle, sinew, nerve and bone which have etched themselves on the back of my eyeballs. I head for the movie theater. I figure that an action movie might provide a strong enough sensory antidote to dispel the vivid mental pictures.

DAY 3

Excitement races through the group today. After our morning circle we approach Red, Eve, and Lucy to enter the inner sanctum of their chests and abdomens. Jeffrey peels back the whole abdominal wall on Lucy’s right side. I reach behind the paper thin, abdominal sack on her left which I had exposed yesterday and marvel at the way the body protects important structures within bags of living tissue. What an amazing order we humans consist of! And our order shares fundamental similarities with creatures across the natural spectrum. The twenty foot dinosaur at the Natural History Museum and I have similar skeletons and nervous systems, our blood and lymph have flowed through similar tubes and vessels within our bodies-Nature’s endless replication amazes me.

I look down at Lucy’s exquisite intestines. A waving, water plant which wanders and packs the belly surprises me. Neither small nor particularly long, the intestines tightly pack the abdomen. Thick and ropy at the base, they spread wide in fans of undulating tissue at the top. I imagine them on the floor of the ocean, waving in the current, at home in the seas.

Gil approaches our table with red handled, heavy duty wire cutters. I want each of you to have a chance at the ribs. After fifteen minutes of delicate cutting, a rectangular window opens to Lucy’s right lung. We turn to the left side of the chest and remove a section of rib cage which accordions freely in our hands. Someone notices a deep red color down below her left lung and we cut further in to explore. A hard, 5 x 8 x 3 inch irregular chunk of something fills the whole lower left corner below the lung. Gentle fingers pull it off the lung wall and we discover rib indentations perfectly stamped in its side. Once again I’m struck by paradox. We have discovered a possible source of Lucy’s malaise. She obviously suffered in some way from it and we feel that loss. Yet the red is deep and rich and by itself quite beautiful. We marvel at the perfect way this heavy lump molded itself into her chest cavity.

It’s a tumor. John deMahy, a nurse turned Rolfing enthusiast guesses. People from other tables hover over Lucy. For the moment we’re transformed into pathologists, intensely curious about the cause of her death.

I don’t see any blood vessels. Doesn’t there have to be blood supply for a tumor to grow? Leland stumps our current line of inquiry, for none can be found. Our exploration uncovers no obvious cause so we eventually remove it to a tray at the foot of the gurney. Everyone inspects the heavy, four or five pound lump with no clue until John breaks off a corner.

Blood. Look inside. He breaks it into smaller pieces. This is a solid piece of blood. She must have bled to death. We intensify our examination by searching under the lung, checking for breaks wherever possible.

Sometime later in the day, after the lung and heart had been cut out as a single unit and placed with the other two on a tray nearby, Jeffrey and Leland pursue their blood quest. Hey, Gil, this crunchiness in Lucy’s veins and arteries can’t be normal. What do you think. Gil has been hopscotching from table to table for days now, but his interest is as piqued as ours. He cuts open the aorta with his scalpel and splits off a layer of white chalk which lines the two inch cylinder.

Cholesterol. Are all of her blood vessels this crunchy? Leland and Jeffrey nod. Look how narrow it is up through her neck here. Her heart had to work really hard to get blood through this gunk. People didn’t understand much about diet twenty years ago. It’s really a shame.

Rebecca finds little deposits of yellow fat in Lucy’s lungs and kidneys. Ever Gil has to admit that this much fat didn’t help. Jeffrey continues to prob( underneath and to the left side of the aorta until he finds a little, irregular hole with a flap.

This is it, an aneurysm. The aorta burst into the left lung. That is why the blood block fit so perfectly.

As the day progresses, Red’s and Eve’s most intimate problems emerge. A green liver speckled with white dots shows itself as Eve’s crew opens her chest. Later, a fist sized, rock hard tumor is found in her stomach. A murky film of white permeates Red’s kidneys. Kidney failure?

Having uncovered our three donors’ deepest ailments touches all of us. A., their unique means of dying have been unveiled we find ourselves closer to them. In their deaths they have offered us the great gift of discovery. They have selflessly revealed their deepest secrets to strangers and in so doing we increasingly feel our human kinship.

I walk away from Lucy periodically throughout the day, reminding myself to look at these bodies in their slowly degenerating entirety. I’m confounded by the combination of disfigurement and singular beauty. When I stand back, collapsing cadavers continue to shock me. My mind revolts from this dehumanization. Yet, when I look at Eve, Lucy and Red’s extraordinary complexity and order, when I recognize streams, trees and earth running through the bodies, I find awe standing strong against revulsion. At the end of the day, a disaster scene confronts my eyes. Lucy’s lower right leg lies detached from the upper. Chest and abdominal cavities of all the cadavers lie hollowed out of organs. Tissue has darkened to a deeper brown. Faces and necks appear gaunt from tissue removal. I am again surprised to recognize how two days of dissection has trained me to reconsider normal.

Pam and I head for the Rio Cafe in Boulder. We elect to self medicate with extra strong Margaritas. I can’t get too carried away, however, because I have to meet my wife and son for his going away meal at Laudisio’s. Ginny says I look awful. When I look in the bathroom mirror, a Gary Larson, Far Side comic character with jowls hanging down to his knees stares back. No wonder I love his sick humor-underneath our civilization Larson speaks a twisted and accurate truth. Regardless of earnest attempts to drown my memory of Lucy with alcohol, I finally accept that my psyche has taken up residence in a dark, gruesome world only shamans, and Gary Larson, seem to enjoy.

DAY 4

I haven’t been able to eat anything remotely resembling meat this week, someone states.

“It took me an hour to get motivated this morning. Several cups of coffee helped, but I found myself saying over and over, ‘I can’t believe I’m going back in there again’. Grace reflects many of our sentiments.”

The circle, which truly approximates more an oval, feels extra heavy today. But I don’t trust myself to be objective in my dark mood.

When we swing the gurney doors down and back, my imagination conjures wings. Angel of Death’s wings. The gurney has become a ritual funerary vessel who wraps itself nightly around our lady. Everyday it opens its embrace and she greets us in one more step toward total dissolution.

We begin to work in whatever area captures our interest. Down at the end of the table, B.J. resumes her careful dissection of Lucy’s lung which sits on a large aluminum tray alongside her heart. With a hemostat in her right hand, she grips cream colored, rubber-band looking straps which run throughout the spongy red lung. The once rich blood vessels have lost not only their red and blue, but also their roundness. Her left hand holds slightly pointy scissors. She reaches into the moist tissue, then pries the tips apart. Reverse-cutting. She holds and pulls the straps gently with the hemostat and spreads with the scissors; hold and spread, shift, hold and spread, working the length and depth of the vessels for several hours. As the intricate branching bifurcates and spreads, rivers and tributaries again fill my mind.

Sometime after lunch, I feel an odd zing run through my body. I look up to see that Jeffrey has poked an acupuncture needle in between Lucy’s eyebrows. Wow. Can you feel that?

Jeffrey looks up, somewhat shocked. I only put it in to check for depth. The books say one thing, but I don’t think their suggestions for the depth of needles is always accurate. Can you really feel that?

Leland catches the strange conversation commencing further up Lucy’s trunk. Close your eyes, Roger. Put another needle in Jeffrey.

I stand at Lucy’s cranium with my hands resting lightly on her bare bone. “I feel something run through the center of her body, from her chest down maybe.” I open my eyes and look at Jeffrey.

He holds her left wrist where a silver acupuncture needle sticks out. This is too weird, he worries. The tone of his voice conveys concern, doubt, excitement, adventure. I’ve never done anything like this before. This is really strange. I hear forbidden.

What was that point? John deMahy joins our spontaneous acupuncture treatment.

It’s called shen men, or ‘spirit gate’. I thought it might speak to Lucy’s broken heart. Can you really feel it?

The three of us nod. We’ve just rocketed out of convention and the air feels charged with discovery.

I can feel it in my autonomics, Leland offers.

I feel a general expansion, there’s a lot of energy running here now, I say.

Something’s moving. Wow, this is really cool! I wish we had some kind of instrumentation to prove this, the former nurse exults.

These types of things don’t test well, I doubt out loud. They’d think us nuts for sure. We are one of the few groups of people who spend enough time in living flesh to develop this kind of sensitivity. Jeffrey, let’s try another one, like the severed leg. Lucy actually feels different now.

Shall I put the lower leg back into the knee joint?

No, let’s see if it carries through without contact.

Jeffrey gives me a look of bewildered thrill. He taps the needle into the foo and the three of us standing in anticipation feel an instant response. Lucy feels more … at ease. As if she had been holding a huge strain and the needles somehow, beyond all convention and possibility, have eased it.

What’s that point? John queries.

Stomach 36. This is a powerful tonifying point for blood and qi.

Jeffrey and a growing troupe head over to Eve. They direct Divo to place her hands on the soles of Eve’s feet and close her eyes. She hasn’t been informed about the acupuncture experiment she’s been drafted into. Jeffrey places a needle in the crown vertex of Eve’s head at Governing vessel 20-bai hui-or ‘point of 100 meetings’. As a powerful harmonizing point, it regulates all of the meridians. Divo reports that she feels suddenly quite hot.

Things have become so strange and wild at this point that John wants to see if Red might respond. He places his gloved hands on Red’s liver, which sits on a gurney maybe thirty feet away from his body. Jeffrey places a needle from Liver 3 to Kidney 1 on the sole of Red’s foot. He works these points because he assumes that Red’s death is somehow associated with his shrunken kidneys. John feels it across the room.

Doubt and excitement mix in a heady broth. The implications of this stagger all of us.

“If you bend a crystal, it releases its energy. Piezoelectric energy, that’s how watches work. Maybe that’s all we were doing, releasing stored energy in the bones and fascia, Leland suggests.”

I wonder, I say. Lucy feels different, not just discharged. I know this sounds really weird, but it seems as if she actually carried a charge and its removal has freed her.

DAY 5

Circle hums this morning. Dreams, implications of the acupuncture experiment and revelations about anatomy pour out. Something changed yesterday, we feel lighter as a group.

We’ve had a number of divergences from the anatomy books, the gentle, German Rolfing instructor Robert Schleip points out. Lucy has extra quadratus lumborum fibers which tie into the psoas, and didn’t you cut the pectoralis major attachment to her humerus and the muscle continued down the biceps? That isn’t in the books. Rebecca nods affirmative.

The texts consider the norms but leave out the anomalies, Gil offers from his arc in the circle. If you don’t actually get down into the body, you have to take their word for it. But oddities abound.

The old Chinese can be pretty arcane, the short, raspy voiced acupuncturist shares his late night research. I’m certain that the old masters did dissection. But they aren’t forthcoming about their results with needles. After tellingus about the three different types of spirit in Chinese medicine which might account for needles having an effect on a cadaver, he jokingly informs us that he is thinking about setting up a post-mortem acupuncture practice.

One woman talks about a dream she had with a cat who acted normally even though her insides had been dissected. One of the men recounts his dream where his genitals had been cut free from the enclosing skin and swung outside his body. He says it felt rather freeing. As a group we have taken up short term residence in a provocative underworld and our dreams comment in nightly updates.

In his morning talk, Gil mentions something about a bat being the shaman’s messenger through the underworld. My dream from the night before flashes back in my mind. I go up to him afterwards.

I dreamt of a bat last night. I didn’t quite know what to make of it until you associated them with the descent through the darkness.

What was the dream?

A huge bat is trying to hide above a light sconce on one of my walls. I’m trying to remove it with a tennis racket. That’s a pretty odd place for a bat to try to hide, on a light fixture. Nonetheless, it’s clear that I’ve got some resistance to accepting the process we are in, trying to get rid of the bat like that.

“I had a strange dream too Rolfer Karen Lackritz has been listening in. I’m lying on the grass of a Tibetan burial ground with a wise person, it may be you Gil. Your nose leads your head around, as if you are trying to detect a scent on me, and you tell me ‘You smell of the milk of pregnancy’. The milk of pregnancy on a burial mound? Birth and death, in the same place?”

We move on to the day. When I arrive at our gurney, Lucy lies in brown muscled disarray under the team’s busy hands. We work to pick up interesting pieces. Leland cuts apart Lucy’s left foot, all the way to and into the bones. By the end of the day, an exploded mock up of her foot lies on a metal tray. Although we’ve explored skeletons in our education, to look at the bones of a foot we originally viewed in the flesh completes pictures in our minds. With the organs removed, people spread across the room. Two or three explore the heart and lungs which sit together on a gurney. Jeffrey begins to dissect Lucy’s right hand.

Up until lunch I move around to pick up interesting perspectives on Red and Eve. Pam stands sentinel over Eve’s cancerous stomach. She is quite moved by Eve’s tragic demise and awed by her apparent strength of character under such painful circumstances. Robert continues to study the various muscles and attachments to the foot. Cut, flex. Cut, flex. Cutting the tibialis anterior and the peroneus longus doesn’t release the arch, he says in his soft German lilt. He discovers that he has to release muscles deep in the foot itself to really free the arch.

When I return to Lucy, Gil has excavated her neck. I haven’t had any time to really stay with anything, he offers. See how substantial the temporalis muscle in the cranium is, the way it dives down under the zygomatic arch? He picks up a small hack saw and removes the curving cheek bone which arcs from eye to ear. Rather than destroying Lucy’s integrity, every cut seems to reveal a greater mystery.

I’m curious about the interosseus membrane which gives the forearm its ability to swivel and rotate. Earlier in the week, Leland had separated all of the muscles down to where he could feel but not see the tough, elastic membrane which binds the two long bones. Up until now we have patiently removed one layer at a time so that a clear order illustrates itself. This late in the process we have to pick and choose what we want to explore. Picking up a scalpel I bluntly cut back the forearm muscles so that I can get a good look at the white fibers of the interosseus membrane which cross over each other in functional geometry. I show the results to Leland and then work up toward the hand. I slice down to the bone just below the famous carpal tunnel in the wrist. Tendons, nerves, veins and muscles poke through like a bundle of electrical wires. I try to pull them through but the fascial matrix resists my gentle attempts. No wonder people hurt when all of this binds up. I can imagine what damage a little bit of swelling and adhesion might do to a compartment which already packs this tightly. Finally, by tugging hard on each chord, I hollow out the narrow crawl space which pains carpenters and keyboard operators alike.

Gil has driven even further into Lucy’s neck. The rest of us don’t want to miss lunch so we leave him to play in the solitary peace of the lab cave. When we return, all the layers of the neck have been beautifully quarried from cranium down to collar bone. Scallenes, longus capitis, sternoclydomastoid, ptergoids-all the muscles, nerves and blood vessels hang free of connective tissue. Another graphic reality can now replace the drawings from books.

We turn Lucy on her front and quickly strip off her white, leathery skin. We’ve become facile with scalpels and in short order a thick layer of yellow confronts us. I have the dubious honor of removing the three to four inches of fat on flat buttocks muscles. Forty-five minutes of swimming in yellow globules turns my stomach. I head over to a mini lecture Gil spontaneously offers a group of women.

He holds Ray’s enlarged, immobile penis in his left hand while he gesticulates with his right. Intimate body parts takes on a whole new meaning as we comfortably handle heart, intestines, vagina, penis and eventually brain. Gil talks about the function of the prostate as he splits the penis from stem to stem. The prostate doesn’t appear distinctly separate from the surrounding tissue. He invites us to feel the donut type thickening around the urethra which gives men such a difficult time in later life.

This is the best sex talk I’ve ever had, Karen offers as Gil expounds on the differences between male and female pelvises and how men might best control genitals which were never meant to be circumcised. The women’s stretchy pelvic floors reveal Eve’s uterus and enwrapping fallopian tubes. A vaginal hysterectomy must have removed Lucy’s reproductive organs for we found no scars on the surface.

I return to Lucy and help clear away the skin and fat on her whole back side. Brown muscles sleeping in clear, striated packing tape cascade in vertical and diagonal order from skull to lower back. Mirrored symmetry of right and left reveals yet again the exquisite harmony of the human body.

For the twentieth time, Lucy reminds me of natural elements. As living beings we branch and bifurcate from large to small and back again endlessly. I look at her pelvis and see a continent narrowing to the peninsula of her femur bone. This becomes two in the lower leg and then scatters into islands in the foot. In my mind I see rich, red water of life flowing in perpetual delivery and retrieval. A universe of delicate capillaries gather waste to organs then, with a massive exchange in the lungs, rush back through major and minor arteries to spread their good will. This process replicates itself in system after system within the body. To see a delta in a liver or a branch of veins in a lung reminds me that we mirror the natural world as surely as a river or a tree.

In this class we have become archeologists of the flesh, seeking to understand what makes us human by removing the animating properties of blood, air and metabolism. Lucy shares her life with us as it has etched itself in the raw materials of bone, muscle, fascia, organ and brain we discover something fundamental about living as we shift and sort through that which life left behind. Maybe this answers some of the unspoken questions I came with. We dig down into the residual of life and find patterns and continuity. Regardless of how lifeless we might appear, we continue to express universal congruence in shape and form.

DAY 6

“A single white, pink or red carnation anoints each gurney when I arrive. I’m certain Eve, Red and Lucy would appreciate Leland’s Hawaiian gesture. Although I am braced for the unveiling, I still can’t maintain equanimity when we swing back the metal covers for the last time. A bizarre spectacle beckons. If it weren’t for the familiar but revolting formaldehyde, Lucy’s back might be catching sunrays.”

Might be, to an excessive imagination. Yet what constitutes “excessive” to my daylight sensibilities functions as normal down in the lab. The shock of Lucy’s dissipated structure shudders through me even as I grab scalpel and hemostat and look for something to explore. We had earlier agreed to save the brain for last. We involve ourselves with hands, back, whatever, for several hours until we can’t constrain ourselves any longer.

Just before noon, Leland and Alex assay the crown jewel of Lucy’s body, her cranium. Whereas we can palpate live organs within the belly and train muscles to change under our hands, the hidden insides of a cranium seem almost magical. Of course we’ve perused drawings, poured over texts on internal cranial structures and held skulls in our hands. But to see and hold the center of human consciousness which, like royalty behind a castle wall, directs our movements and our thoughts? To unveil something as well protected and central to our humanness as a human brain? Our excitement is tempered by uncertainty. We don’t know if we will find an intact brain when we open up her head. If the preserving process wasn’t started immediately, Lucy’s gray matter will have turned to mush.

With a hacksaw they score a shallow groove from back to front, starting at her occipital bone where her neck meets her skull. Following the sagittal suture which divides the right and left sides of her head, they j deepen the cut until they break through. They turn her over and slowly saw down through the forehead, the nose, then across the mouth. Back and forth and down in a single, straight line. They work slowly and very carefully until a thin crevasse separates the right and left sides of her head. With a cheap, serrated bread knife, The Amazing Ginzu!, they delicately slice down through soft brain. They grab both sides of her fissuring face and, with a bony crack, split her head into two, perfectly matched halves.

Gil comes over to examine. I’ve never done it this way. With three cadavers we have so much more latitude. Wow! Look how you perfectly exposed the vertical membrane of the falx cerebri. See this little nubby protuberance here which popped out of the right side when you opened it up? That’s the pituitary gland. This little cavity is the first or second ventricle. This is fantastic!

I look over at elegant Eve. Pam, Wanda, Robert and the others have carved a cranial hat off Eve’s head to expose elastic, gray dura. They discretely cut and tug until the leathery dura comes out as a skull cap, vertical falx standing erect within a gray bowl. Off-white brain snakes in tight undulations under their hands. Reverently, they take turns caressing the hilly terrain of her exposed globe.

Gil seems semi ecstatic from the quality of all three brains. Although every step through this process has excited us, something extra speciallies splayed open on the tables. As ac group we move from brain to brain to examine the ins and outs and convolutions. With an hour left in the class, I return to Lucy. I slice horizontal sections through the right hemisphere of her brain while Leland operates on her left eye. Our front to back, sagittal section offers access to eyes which the others don’t. Nonetheless, Leland and Alex have to cut through quite a bit of facial bone to pop free the eyeball. Leland places it on the gurney shoulder and very gently cuts through the cornea with a scalpel. Sticky, semi-thick vitreous fluid spills out onto the table. He cuts free the lens and picks up the soft red gem. What do you think? He places it on one of his fingers, a once living gemstone.

Too much for me, I respond.

Well, the Tibetans drink out of skulls.

As Leland splits the eye into two halves, we discover a black lining throughout. This is how cameras work! The only light which can be read by the brain must come from the outside or we wouldn’t see anything.

Our brains touch the world directly through our eyes. We have observed and probed Lucy for six days and now, oddly, we have exposed how she looked out. What did she see throughout a life which led her to donate her body to students such as us? However she arrived at her decision, she gave us an opportunity to understand her in ways we don’t even know ourselves. I’m not certain that I will be so generous.

Although we have fled the lab at the end of the previous days, now we wish for more time to explore brains and any other coveted organs, joints or cavities. Nonetheless, we ve spent our time and must close. We gather Lucy’s remains in the blue body bag. Leland finds the carnations he anointed the gurneys with this morning, and rests them across each heart as it sits uncertainly in Eve’s, Red’s and Lucy’s cavernous chests. Each team shares a moment of silence over their donor before closing the long, curving zipper. We wash our tools, peel the gloves off our hands for the last time, then head into the showers for our final ablution.

“What have I gained during this grueling six day week of dissection? Why? a psychiatrist friend asks me with disbelief. Why? an old, acupuncturist friend queries with disgust. Why? some of my clients wonder, revolted. I deliver differing responses, all legitimate and none completely accurate.”

It almost goes without saying that my professional understanding of the body has deepened. How could it not? Yet need I have entered this dark cavern to better my touch? As I return to work I notice subtle changes. Sensing the quality of fascial cotton candy under my fingers, I may linger a little longer at the surface. Visualizing the undulating water plants of intestine as I pass through them to the psoas at the back of the abdomen certainly makes my touch more informed, more accurate. But, was cutting and scraping a human cadaver necessary for my work? No. For my understanding of life? I think so.

Twenty different stories could be written from this week. Some would undoubtedly detail new knowledge about anatomy, would confirm or deny assumptions we Rolfers make in our work. I hope those stories will be written, for all of our benefits. But when daylight falters and I head home for the night, what remains of the week are pictures, vivid and blunt, of Lucy slowly disintegrating under the force of our scalpels, hemostats, saws and wills.

And what of my early question about the interconnectedness of soul and the body? The surprising rush of energy catalyzed by acupuncture needles planted in Lucy’s flesh might address that. Yet I’m not certain how to interpret it. Surely some kind of energy changed during that experiment. Was it just stored energy in reflected itself in the quality of her organs, the shape of her muscles, and certainly in the nature of her death. But these things don’t really address the question of soul, for something as difficult to pin down in normal life proves that much more illusive in a dead person.

Maybe the little deaths which stared at me in smelly, graphic detail three or four times a day, which tried to inoculate me against the deadliness of taking life too much for granted, maybe these address the why of taking such a workshop. When I look back at the confront of disassembling Lucy, Red and Eve’s bodies, I realize that my own and others’ revulsion runs deeper than identification. Of course, when we see or imagine a scalpel cutting through skin we shrink away within our own bodies. But the sight and smell of these cadavers shocked me at a much deeper level. For nothing confirms death as absolutely as the slow and meticulous dissection of a human body. Cut by cut and layer by layer, the surety of death commands your attention. Since the dawn of time, men and women have revered and feared the dead. We are no different in our enlightened modern age. For six days Red, Eve and Lucy walked us through an underworld simultaneously thrilling and repulsive. If I return to another dissection, a deeper allurement than the acquisition of knowledge will call. It will be because I learned something about living by opening the hearts and bodies of the dead.