One day during dissection lab, we removed one of the lower limbs of our donor’s body to get a better look at her internal organs. Once I finished the sweaty work with the saw, I gazed at the table beneath her body, where small flecks of bone had piled up. I watched one of my lab mates carefully collect them and place them in the bucket of remains to be cremated. I knew each fragment had been carefully constructed over years through intricate pathways of cellular signaling. Her body had continually built and rebuilt this bone from the food she consumed, from the water she drank, from the rest she enjoyed – from the love she received.

Who had nourished her body from before her birth? I thought of my own mother, a woman of ceaseless activity in the service of others. The first time I ever saw her resting with her feet propped up (“being horizontal,” we call it in my family) was at age fifty-four. How many loaves of her five-seed whole-grain bread had built my body?

I looked down at my arm and saw it all, saw each freckle dotting my skin as the fruit of love. A love that, in the end, came not from my mother – a human as mortal as I am – but through her from the Mystery we call God.

Dissecting a cadaver taught me reverence for life and eternity.