How my father donated his body to Brown University Medical School
Dear Dad,
I miss you. I dreamt about you last night and you were laughing. I’m not really surprised. I’m sure you’re happy. Maybe you were laughing because although you are gone physically, and I told you that you died, you were really trying to tell me you’re not gone. That your spirit is still here. Isn’t that what Clara said? Isn’t that what I said? That the spirit stays close to the places and people that they loved?
I was so mad. I was so mad at you for laughing at me. I just wanted you to be right here. Physically!
I know you are here in my memories and signs but some days I just really miss you. They say that anger is a part of grief but I didn’t think I could be mad at you. I know you’re ok and I know I’m ok but I really miss you. And today I’m just so sad because when my memories of you come back so clear it makes me realize I can’t call you. I can’t sit and have coffee with you. And it hurts. I don’t want you to be gone.
I know I should be happy you were laughing. I should see it as a sign that I need to laugh. To be happy. I know you would hate to see me sad. But some days, all this love I have just comes out in tears. My heart hurts because it’s broken and it will never be quite the same since you left.
I know you are always with me. I know I have to open up to the signs. To let you show me you are still here. But today I’m just so sad and mad. Please come visit me again. I want to see you in my dreams. I just want to feel your confort. Feel you put your arm around me like the picture of you and Isaiah. I miss you so much. I want to feel comforted. I just want to feel that peace I always got from just being around you.
Thank you for all you did and for being the best dad I could have. For being the best example. For teaching me to see the good in people. I love you always.
Love,
Elissa
THERE WAS NO FUNERAL
There was no funeral. No casket. No wake. No final goodbye after his spirit had moved on from the physical body. There was no church service. No final viewing.
I wasn’t there when he took his last breath. When they carried his body out from the hospice building and into the hearse that would transport him to the funeral home.
Instead, he would be sent to Brown University. A school he had never attended but now would become not a student, but a teacher, in some strange and unusual way.
He wouldn’t be speaking to these students. He wouldn’t be sharing his knowledge of life and love. He wouldn’t teach them about how to “stick and move” as he had done all those years ago. He wouldn’t teach them all the lessons and tips he had taught me over the years.
How to bake bread and how to cook the best bacon ever, with patience and a low and slow heat until it was crispy, yet chewy, never blackened or burnt. He wouldn’t be giving them advice about how “a good cook never leaves the kitchen” or how “too much of anything will kill ya”.
These students may never know about the incredible cedar chests he would build with his hand over the years. They would never experience the soft, gentle patience of his spirit.
They would never hear the dry, sarcastic comments he would mutter softly under his breath. The ones you had to be carefully listening for, to catch in a crowded, noisy room.
They would never have the opportunity to know the patience he had shown each one of his grandchildren as he took the time to listen and show them what he was doing. They would never hear his gentle advice about how if you really want someone to listen to you, you shouldn’t yell, but speak softly so they could really hear what you were saying.
No. There was no standing by his grave sight in the heat of the August summer while his body was lowered into the ground, mourners standing around as tears splashed off noses and onto the grass and final flowers were tossed on a wooden casket.
Instead, his body would be shipped over to Brown’s medical student facility to be used as a cadaver in research.
Those final goodbyes would be sacrificed by his loving wife of 52 years, his 3 grown daughters, 5 grandchildren, 2 great grandchildren and countless nieces and nephews.
Instead, there would be months of medical students, visiting his body every day. Learning about how the body works, the ins and outs. Studying the veins and arteries and every part of his physical body. This body, who was no longer really him, but the shell that had contained his spirit for over 82 years of life on this earth.
Instead there would be a celebration. Actually, more than one. The first would be a gathering of friends and family at the elks lodge, where myself, my mother, sisters, son, nieces, nephews and friends could share food, stories, music and a budweiser in honor of the man he was and the man he would be remembered as.
Not a perfect man, but a loving father, a kind friend, a veteran, a carpenter, a boxer, a baker, a beer drinker, a giver and a sarcastic swamp Yankee. Over 100 people would make their way into the hall to share a meal and a story. To celebrate a man so loved.
This would be how we said goodbye. In a place where my father loved. In a way my father would have loved.
Sometimes I wonder if saying goodbye in this way has changed the way I grieve. I wonder how different my grief would have been had we had a “normal” funeral service.
I wonder if seeing his lifeless body would have changed how I processed his death. If being there with him in the final moments, as he took his last breath, would have changed my life and his death.
Then I think of the words my friend told me as I was waiting in those final days for him to pass. When she said, “Just remember, you are HIS baby. He knows if you should be there or not.”
As much as I try to be content in knowing that things work out the way they are meant to, I still often wonder if I should have been there. If he ever felt abandoned by us for not being there in the moment. I can’t help but wonder how different it may have been.
But I know it wouldn’t change the fact that he is no longer here.
It wouldn’t change the fact that I miss him every day.
It wouldn’t change the fact that there is this hole in my heart that can never be filled again.
And I know that somehow, I have to find peace in knowing that everything happened the way that it was supposed to.
The second celebration for my father would come months later, in May of 2019, when the students of Brown Medical would hold an appreciation ceremony to honor the doner families.
A celebration in which we would meet the students and share stories of our loved ones. A celebration in which my mother and I would learn just how much these students appreciated and respected my father for what he had done for them.
Where the students would be eager to learn about the man he had been. Where they would share their respect for these donors and appreciation in all they had learned.
Where I would be surprised to learn from one student how on her last day with her “person” she confided that she had gone home and cried. She too had grieved the loss.
I was so touched to know that what my father had done was so much more than donate his body. To see how he had continued to touch so many lives with his presence even after leaving this earth.
To realize that these students would go on to not only learn from my father and the other donors, but to use this knowledge to better the lives of others. That my father’s life would not only affect the lives of those he touched in his lifetime but would continue to touch over the years to come.
To think about these students going into their own practice in the future and continue to learn and cure and save other lives. So, when I think about the sacrifice that we, as a family, made in giving up a formal funeral and the sacrifice my father made in donating his body, it brings me such joy to know how his legacy will continue to live on in decades to come.
As much as I miss him every day, I am glad to know that he lives on in spirit through all that have known him in life and in his death.
Adventures of the Traveling Grief Case 
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