What Nana Wants

             Somebody’s nana is naked and dead in a clear plastic bag on a metal table in front of me.  I want to hold her face in my hands and put my forehead to hers, wake her up and get her out of here.  I want to put something soft under her and put a warm blanket on her.  Put coins on her eyes.  Wrap her in white cloth.  Sit with her family.

            I’ve worked with cadavers before, but their heads were always covered.  Seeing Nana’s face makes her so much more real for me.  I want to know who she was.  Would she argue politics with me?  I bet she would be horrified to have this messed up dirty hair and no lipstick on.

            Now I want to see where her body is marked.  Surgeries?  Bruises?  Scars?  Can I see evidence of how or why she died?  My own grandmother would have loved to talk about her back surgery, her eyeglass prescription, the pains of the stomach cancer that killed her.  “The surgeon was such a sweetheart, honey, but that nurse was evil.”  Nana on the table has a scar on her lower left leg – was it broken?  A mole gone rogue, maybe?  Did she like her doctor?

            I hate that I am eager to turn Nana over and rip open her back.  She is too heavy for me to lift, full of formalin, and this feels very wrong.  I am reassured by the caution of my table-mates, that along with concerns for spilling fluid on the floor we are concerned with keeping Nana in one piece, no hands dangling over the edge.

            And here is Nana’s lovely back, where her husband rested his hand at parties, where she reached to secure a necklace.  We are about to turn her inside out, take her apart, scrape her bones like my grandmother would clean a turkey.  There will be power tools used on her such that she cannot be put back together.  And but Nana, a woman with likes and dislikes, annoying habits and great talent, worries and pride, chose to be here now.  She can’t feel the scalpel split the skin at her neckline, run down her spine.  But this must be true: her wish was for this to happen.