Halfway through our first dissection lab, we paused around the metal table where my lab group and I were hard at work.

We had just sawed through our donor’s ribcage and peeled back the protective membranes covering her heart and lungs. A sickly green fluid met us, which our instructor diagnosed as a chest infection that may have contributed to the donor’s premature death – though numerous nodules in her lungs argued that cancer had also played a role. Slowed but undeterred, we cleaned her organs and pressed on. I cradled a lung in my right hand as I sliced through her bronchi and pulmonary blood vessels with my left, doing my utmost to keep the tissue whole and intact. As whole and intact as a disease-riddled lung of a dead woman could be.

In my relatively healthy and relatively young body, my awareness of the finitude of my life often remains notional. In anatomy lab, death was stubbornly concrete, filling my nose and mouth with the stench of formaldehyde.

One afternoon, our task was to bisect the head. I was the first to arrive in lab. Knowing that one of my lab mates was finding this unit particularly taxing, I acted quickly, hoping to get the hardest cuts out of the way before she finished changing into her scrubs. As I took a scalpel to our donor’s face, tears trickled down my own face and collected in my mask. I longed to hand the tool to another. Taking my cue from a friend who is a surgeon, I made an act of contrition: “Oh my God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. I am sorry for all the ways I have served death.”

As the weeks passed, I began having visions. Perhaps not visions in the strict sense, but perceptions of the depth of reality. They came to me in mundane moments: watching a man cross the street, calling my mother on video, glancing at the boy in the squat rack next to mine at the gym. I would suddenly see the living person as suspended in life by a thread, as existing only contingently in time and space. The body would suddenly lose its illusory appearance of inevitability and show itself as given, as formed and placed in that very instant by Another.

At first, I was unaware of any connection to anatomy lab. Then, one day, 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. I recalled the scandal of this Mystery, who, knowing that human bodies are built by bread, gives us his very flesh as food.

“Every one of the hairs of your head is counted,” he tells us (Luke 12:7). Every joy and suffering ever experienced in this body lying before me is counted, numbered by the One who became like us in all things but sin, held by the One who alone can make it last into eternity.

Later that afternoon, as we untangled a dense network of nerves, I found myself staring in disorientation at the leg we had detached from our donor’s body. I had never seen a leg separated from a body. Then my lab mate flipped the limb over and aligned her hip bones, and in an instant everything came together. The body is not merely an assemblage of parts but a whole. It is a body because it is whole, and its being whole depends upon Another.

The following week, I signed off a Zoom call with a friend a few minutes before lab began. Today, I told him, we would be dissecting the hands. Aaron stroked his beard. “Sofia, remember the words of Gandalf: ‘He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has departed from the path of wisdom.’”

I mulled over his words as I pulled apart the tendons of our donor’s fingers. I am no stranger to reductionism. Before entering medical school, I was a researcher in neuroscience – a field premised upon the reduction of some of the most precious things about human life to their neural substrates. Daily, I came up against the limitations of this approach to the person. What use was it to identify the brain regions correlated with mental illness when, in the end, what everyone needs is a source of meaning and hope amid inevitable suffering?

In fact, this was one reason I had changed professions and now found myself in an anatomy lab. During a postdoctoral fellowship, I happened to witness the work of a neurologist for the first time when the head of my laboratory, a physician scientist, invited me to shadow him as he cared for stroke survivors. I was stunned by what I saw. Instead of relentlessly abstracting from human experience to reach generalized conclusions about the brain – and often instrumentalizing the person in the process – he put our knowledge of the brain in the service of particular human lives.

As he held the trembling hands of old men and spoke to women with slurred speech, he left nothing aside. Every need – all the complexity of their hearts and minds – was welcome in his clinic.

He is an exceptional physician, and before starting medical school I worried that he was an exception. I worried that my classmates and I would learn to see patients as a mere collection of organ systems, each the rightful territory of a different specialist. I worried that we would begin to forget all that cannot be quantified in the columns of an electronic health record.

That day in anatomy lab, my lab group and I mused about our donor. Her nails were freshly painted a bold red. Was this a ritual that helped her get through chemotherapy? Who had been with her at the salon? Did they know she was so sick? What had inspired her to donate her body to medical education?

As I gazed into their faces, earnest and pensive, I found an answer to Aaron’s warning. We were breaking apart our donor’s body, yes, but not to find out what she was. Now that her human life was gone, the essence of her being was no longer in this mortal flesh; it was something that had found visible expression, for a time, in and through a body – through those red nails, through those tendons and bones. Those of us who approach medicine with the eyes of faith will use reductionist methods to heal our living patients as well, but with awareness of the eternal soul: we will use our skills and knowledge as a sign of our desire for a life that will never end.

Of course, reverence for human life is not a given in medicine. That was clear to me during the weeks we dissected the pelvis. The casual familiarity with which some spoke of these body parts and their functions made my stomach turn. I struggled to overcome the urge to cover our donor’s body and turn away – out of a mixture of protectiveness and grief and reverence. Over the weekend, I revisited Bishop Erik Varden’s masterful work Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, and found these words:

Even disordered eros can kindle a sanctifying love of God that drives out fear. Nothing is beyond God’s ordering power. Nothing in man is unredeemed. Everything natural to man is made in view of the robe of glory. The new Adam waits to embrace the old. The garments of skin are lent to us for a while, to warm and protect us. Then we are to leave them behind.

Here was a vision for medicine. Here was a view of the person that could animate my path as a physician: every bodily reality contains an echo of God and eternal life.

The next day, we were having difficulty identifying several muscles of the pelvic floor. As we searched through layers of tissue, we managed to flag down our anatomy instructor, who informed us that these muscles – small to begin with – were likely shredded when our donor gave birth to children. My hands stilled at the thought of life coming from this body and leaving it marked, even in death, with signs of maternity. What signs will there be at my death that I have given life to God’s children, the poor and lonely and suffering of this world? Will my hands be calloused from their care, my knees from entreaty for their good?

On the last day of anatomy lab, we cleaned what remained of our donor’s body. With each wipe, a different feeling returned to me: the anxiety of our comprehensive limb exam, the joy of discovering an obscure blood vessel, the tension of growing used to the sight of death. I offered a brief prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of this woman.