I recently sent my beloved dog, Simon, across the rainbow bridge. With the injection of a tranquilizer, he was asleep but alive. The moment the last injection was administrated, his being shifted. It was obvious that he was no longer there. What remained was just a body–a form of my beloved dog. It was no longer Simon. I left his form with the vet for cremation.

I might have a different reaction to human forms. I witnessed my grandmother’s death. Her heart was medically kept beating until her son arrived to witness her ultimate crossing. I stayed with her body overnight as a part of the Buddhist ritual of wake. Since then, I have experienced three more death in my family. In my old country, family members of the deceased accompany the body to the crematorium and wait for it to become bones. We pick up pieces of the bones with long chopsticks to place them in a small urn. For family members the death is not considered complete until this ritual is performed.

Whether it was Simon’s peaceful passing, my grandmother’s ritualized journey to ashes, or the cadaver I stand before, each moment reminds me of the fragile threshold between life and death–how quickly being gives way to form.

Standing at the dissection table, holding a scalpel with a fresh blade, most first-time dissectors hesitate to make the first cut. I did. Unless you are a surgeon, or other specific medical professional, you have not intentionally cut another person’s skin. A cadaver with the skin intact is closed off from and protected against the outside world. However vulnerable it may look, it maintains its integrity as a whole human being. The hesitancy comes from the violation of the personal boundary that the skin represents—the ultimate “Authorized Personnel Only” sign. It is the line of demarcation between the dead and the living. I still remember my first cut. It was on a cadaver named “Tony.”  I watched other experienced dissectors make their first cuts, then followed nervously, as if I might be reprimanded for my act of violation. The tip of the scalpel scratched the surface, creating a paper-cut thin, shallow pale line. No blood. With a little more pressure, the skin/dermis began to separate. The surface tension that had kept the entire body whole lost its hold, and the boundary broke. The cadaver opened itself up to the dissectors. I crossed the boundary.  After that, in my perception, it was not a person but a human form in which a person used to reside. A cadaver has no boundary, though deserves due respect.  With a long incision in the skin, I felt as if the human form released all the tension with a sigh of relief, saying, “It’s over. No more need to hold this form.”

You have only one chance to experience the first cut. So better be mindful.

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