Trauma

Your femur is broken in a way that makes your leg hang at an unnatural angle, the bone erupts up, through the skin. They call these “distracting” injuries, these obvious, painful, almost exaggerated injuries that could steal our attention away from other more insidious, more deadly injuries you may have suffered.

But that isn’t the issue here. Your spirit has already left your body.

“Time for the secondary, Dave”

“Yep”

“Can someone roll while I take a look at her back?”

“Yep”

You were young, you were healthy as far as I can tell, fit even. Your arms have the outlines of muscles that see regular, active use - did you play a high school sport? There, along your flank, just below the curve of your rib cage is a small hole, I can’t even fit the tip of my pinky into it. That’s where a bullet either entered or exited your body. That is where a small metal ball left your body, most likely, after it ripped open one of the large chambers of your heart, and tore you away from your family, your friends.
Did you go to prom this year?
Did you have a dog?
Did you do senior skip day at your school?

It’s been a long month of this.

As my co-resident put it, “I cannot keep watching young black boys and girls die.”

There are these plastic stretchers, dozens, leaning up against the wall outside the hospital, like rental surf boards. I walk by them on my way into work every morning. I wonder to myself, every morning, how much death did these boards convey into us. Just one? Five? Fifteen, just last night? These boards could have been anything. They could have been melted down and used for kiddy pools. They could have been the plastic in your straw for you to sip through, the tray your meal comes on, the casing on the lights overhead, the pen I’m holding as I write down each of your injuries, the ways in which your body was broken.

These plastic boards are sometimes covered in blood, just before someone gets a chance to scrub them down. But some things you cannot wash away. These plastic surf board stretchers look like those life-savers life guards wear around their shoulders on TV. They could have been one of those. They still can be. Do they ever get tired of carrying in corpses? Your fragile body came in on one of those. Your body agonized on one of those, for minutes, probably. Before the blood that was trying to get to your brain poured out in a warm puddle around your broken heart.

There on the left side of your chest, just to the left of middle, is another wound. Small. My little pinky finger wouldn’t even fit into it.

I look down at your arm pits, your arms, your hands, your fingers, your pinkies. You are broken beyond our repair. I wonder how. I wonder at your beauty, the beauty of your irreplaceable brain, your fingers that held your mother’s hand when you were a baby, the careful architecture of your wrist and arms that will never hold the people you loved. I run my hand over your cold belly, soft, dead.

“No other obvious traumatic injuries to the back, buttocks, posterior legs”

Your spirit has departed your body, and now this shell echoes a longing in me, a small hollow in my heart, that I will keep you in. I wonder how we come to this place, where we can discard each other like trash, like used coffee filters, like disposable gloves. Maybe your killer should be forced to perform the secondary exam of your corpse. Maybe they should be forced to go to medical school and learn the thousands of mysterious and wonderful ways your body coalesces into a living, breathing, walking whole, a human living, a human being. Maybe the only justice is the knowledge of good and evil.

How can you be properly haunted until you begin to understand the miracle that was the life, the breathing body, the sinewy, vascular, muscled, organic wholeness that gave rise to the thinking, feeling, moving, wanting, desiring creature.

Maybe the knowledge will produce the appropriate grief and repentance. We should grieve your tendons. we should wear grey mourning clothes and raise a cry in public over your viscera, your precious kidneys, we should wail with abandon at the intersections over your liver. We should mourn like the psalmist over your cold toes.