It was a Saturday, almost a year ago.
It was our first class in the ‘hot wards’, the emergency, as compared to our usual travails amongst the chronics at the ‘cold wards’.
We were all a little awed, I think. The cold wards were almost a relaxing place to be compared to the frenetic activity that was taking place around us. Here was imminent death, a fog of palpably immediate pain.
Our class was taken by a post graduate trainee.
Ruzy, we called her, a diminutive of her unpronounceably long name. She is from somewhere in the North-east; young, very pretty in a Michelle Branch sort of way. The thing about her is that she has the tiniest hands, red and white, with which she gestures as she speaks. Captivating hands. Quite a few of us fancied her at the time.
At the end of the class she said that we were going to learn how to examine the lympho-reticular system.
She brought us out into the corridor.
The corridor is where the overflow is housed, on trolleys. Many people never make it to beds.
This one hadn’t. An old man, with some kind of lymphoma, I don’t remember exactly. But he was quite dead.
Ruzy knew, of course. She told us that he had died that morning, but his lymph nodes were very enlarged, and it was a good specimen.
And so we had the rest of our class. We learned to palpate the horizontal chain of cervical lymph nodes. And it was extremely instructive, I have never seen pre-auricular lymph nodes that big.

It was the first time I had touched something freshly dead. He was not cold; he felt clammy.

K said that his head was very heavy, and that it would have been easier if he'd been alive.
Ruzy agreed.
I remember thinking that that was not a very good eulogy. I almost laughed. I wanted to leave, to go wash my hands, to be anywhere else.

I know you’re probably thinking that this is a violation of a man’s dignity in death.
But you don’t understand.

You see, there is no such thing.