Does Death Imitate Life?

My heart was pounding in my chest when I saw them for the very first time. They were lying on the table.

Bare. Naked. Stripped.

I was thankful their face was covered, and I desperately hoped that was how it would stay. I knew I wouldn't be able to handle seeing their face.

And so it was.

When I finally did see their face, I could not stop the tears. I was sobbing. Heartbroken at what might have been. Bereft at a life lost. And yet, filled with awe.

How much strength and courage must it have taken to donate their body to complete strangers?

They must have had a funny bone, I thought.

Pun intended? Yes, of course.

You see, I met them—the donor entrusted to us—during a human anatomy and dissection lab with the remarkable KNM Labs team at the Institute for Anatomical Research in gorgeous Colorado Springs. For an entire week, we were guided by our extraordinary teachers, Leslie Kaminoff and Lauri Nemetz, along with our equally wonderful producer and lab assistant, Lydia Mann, and an amazing cohort of fellow learners.

Together, we learned from the extraordinarily generous gift our donor had given us: themselves.

And I couldn't help but wonder about them.

Who were they?

Did they actually have a sense of humor? Or was that my imagination?

Heartaches? Heart throbs? What brought joy to them? What maladies did they suffer?

You see, we knew almost nothing about them—only their age and what we suspected might have caused their death. Even that was left for us to deduce.

As we gingerly moved through the layers of their body, we began to imagine the stories that made up their life.

Their joys. Triumphs. Trials and sorrows.

Their choices. Their stories.

And then I noticed the irony. Or is it a striking similarity?

What is life, if not a collection of stories we string together?

Stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Stories others tell about us. Stories handed down to us. Some we inherit and accept. Others we question and rewrite. And we carry some long after they no longer serve us.

Over time, these stories accumulate, layer upon layer.

Some joyful. Some momentous. Some frayed. Some somber. Some we hold onto fiercely. Sometimes knowingly, other times unbeknownst to us!

We may not choose every layer. Many beliefs are handed down to us. So many expectations are placed upon us. Every heartbreak. Every loss. Every story we tell ourselves, or that someone else narrates about who we are.

And gradually, over time, we assimilate those stories within ourselves. We become them!

This irony—or perhaps striking similarity—stopped me mid-thought. As we moved deeper into our donor's body, carefully revealing one layer after another, I posed this question to myself…

Does death imitate life?

Just as in life, we accumulate layers of experiences, beliefs, memories, stories and identity, isn't each layer of the human body telling a story too? 

Even in death? Even after death?

Each layer revealing something marvelous. Wondrous.

Sometimes heart-wrenching.

At other times, awe-inspiring.

And with every discovery we made, we took what little we knew and began to weave stories about our benevolent donor.

Perhaps this happened...

Maybe they experienced this...

Just as we do in life. With ourselves and, sometimes, with others too.

We tug at a small piece and often create an entire story out of it.

And as I stood there, surrounded by all that I was learning, another question began to emerge…

When all the layers are stripped away, what remains?

When our stories begin to fade, when the identities we so carefully carve begin to lose their significance, what stays?

The stories. The layers. The identities. Perhaps they are not the entirety of who we are.

What is left? What was always there all along?

And the answer that came back to me was our being-ness.

What we can come back to, again and again.

Our being-ness.

Perhaps that is the art of being?

As I held their heart in my hands, I wept silent tears of gratitude.

For the gift they had given us.

For all they had taught me. For all they would continue to teach me.

I will never know the stories of their life. But I do know that their final act was one of extraordinary generosity and fortitude.

In death, they gave complete strangers the opportunity to discover and learn.

Parts of their body appeared ravaged and torn to the naked eye. Yet all I could see was something profoundly beautiful.

Beneath all the physical layers and the imagined stories we wove, there was simply a human being.

A gentle reminder that beneath our stories, the beliefs we inherit, the identities we nurture, and the layers we accumulate throughout a lifetime...

There is perhaps just that which was always there… 

A being…

Just... a being.

Perhaps, in the end, that is the secret of Just BE’ing℠.

My deepest gratitude and salutations to them.