Creative Writing Award Winner - 2013
Class of 2012
Katherine Parker Bryden
Katherine Parker Bryden earned an MFA with Distinction from the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History in 2006. While working as an award-winning video producer for the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health, she also had two sons, trained and worked as a doula, helped found a doula cooperative, and won grants to start a community garden. She is currently in her first year at YSN and will graduate in 2015 as a Nurse-Midwife and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner.
Visible Man
On a computer screen, Visible Man lies naked: a doll sized body, Shrek-like in shape and color, sagging belly and jowls. Visible Man is beefy, a bullet head giving way to a bull neck that widens into the slope of his shoulders. His back flattens oddly wherever it touches the surface that supported him in death. No shroud covers his face. His bald head and the sickly green cast of his skin give little clue to his age or ethnicity. Tattoos spread like wings across the front of his body. One looks like a half-finished prison tattoo of a galleon, the other is a dull black smear on his skin. Two ridged lines run from his face down his torso and legs, giving him the appearance of a bronze-cast sculpture awaiting chasing. Horizontal stripes traverse his body, the artifacts of having been sliced into one-millimeter thick segments from head to toe, photographed, and stitched back together using a 3-D digital rendering program.
Visible Man does not look like the donors in the gross anatomy lab. They are primarily elderly, with deflated breasts and crepe-paper skin. The edge of a stubbly face or a stringy wisp of grey hair sometimes peeks out from beneath the shrouds that cover their faces to preserve their anonymity. These donors inspire tenderness in me. I want to tuck their hair back up, hold their hands, treat them gently even in death. Week by week, layer by layer, the medical students dissect their bodies, skin covering fat covering muscle covering peritoneum covering intestines and pouchy stomach. Hearts beat without ceasing for 56, 75, 89 years. Now we hold them in our hands and see the calcified valves and cranberry blood still clotted in their chambers. The anatomists slice open kidneys so that we can see the calyces and pyramids, the visible parts of an impossibly elegant filtration system. Week after week, their bodies prove the miracle of our existence, the transmutation of bananas and salmon into the fleshy vehicles that give rise to consciousness. The donors inspire reverence and profound gratitude, both for the gifts of their bodies to the School of Medicine, and for the gift of my own mortal coil, received from my mother and the universe.
What did the donors do in life? Did they dance tangoes, drink too much alcohol, walk a thousand miles, pilot a World War II fighter plane? I will never know their stories, but I know their last wish was to make their bodies available for the education of students studying medicine and nursing at my school, at Yale. At the end of their time, the students who worked with them for a year hold a ceremony, make art and write poems in their honor, and pay their respects to the people who generously shared their bodies as instruments for education.
But Visible Man has another story. Joseph Paul Jernigan was a convicted murderer who agreed to donate his body “to science.” He did not know that an hour and a half after he was executed by lethal injection, his body would undergo preparation for an elaborate scientific dissection, documentation, and permanent public display in a National Library of Medicine database. There is no tenderness in what was done with his body. It was shipped from Texas to Colorado, scanned, imaged, frozen in gel, and ground into nonexistence, millimeter by millimeter, by a cryomacrotome milling device with a fourteen-inch precision saw blade. Jernigan’s body was destroyed and made the centerpiece in a sophisticated digital map of the human body.
Does this posthumous mortification of Jernigan’s flesh confer atonement, punishment, forgiveness? Is his spirit redeemed by transforming his earthly vessel into a tool for education and healing? Once dead and reconstituted in cyberspace, is this man who took another person’s life freed from the being labeled a murderer? Is this paying his debt to society, and then some?
It bothers me, the fact that he did not explicitly consent to becoming the Visible Man. Was this somehow justified on the grounds that he had taken a life, and therefore did not deserve to decide the final disposition of his body? Did the Visible Human team consider it an honor to be selected? In “The Visible Human Male: A Technical Report,” the authors give special thanks “for the silent part they played” to 26 people, and Joseph Paul Jernigan was not one of them. As donor for the Visible Man, does he not deserve to be acknowledged as the central, silent figure in this project? In death, does he not become another naked, vulnerable human body equal with all the rest of us? Seeing his body on the screen, my heart opens and says yes. And if the creators of the Visible Human Project did not see fit to thank him, I thank him now.