Goodbye July

August is finally here. I have mixed feelings about August - one the one hand, it signals that my summer is more than half over. All too soon the leaves will change, chilled winds will blow, and snowflakes will twirl and tumble. As this is my last summer in Vermont for the foreseeable future, there is a part of me that wants to gather up the summer months and hold them tightly in my fist so that they will never leave.

 One the other hand, it means that July is finally over and I've been waiting for that moment for about 31 days. I suspect that for the rest of my life July will be a difficult month because it brings back a multitude of painful memories that I'd rather pretend never happened in the first place. It's the month of my brother's birth and it's the month of his death and it's the month where all of the joy in the world can't quite overcome the sorrows and stresses of the last year.

 I spent the entire month rotating through the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I could say many things about what that means, but the upshot is really that I spent (almost) the entirety of the month with the dead, helping out with the daily autopsy schedule. In a way, going to work every day was almost more than I could mentally handle. It's hard to face death on a daily basis when there are still so many unresolved issues and agonies in my personal life. It was a struggle to stand toe-to-toe with the dead, to look at them and read about their final moments and wonder about their lives and piece together their stories and not run kicking, screaming, and crying from the autopsy suite. And with each Y-incision that I made, it never stopped feeling like I was cutting open my little brother and laying bare his agonies to the world.

I wish I could say that I faced down each day with a professionalism, dignity and grace that would make my medical school mentors proud but I'd be lying. There were some days where all of the mental pep-talks in the world couldn't get me down into that morgue in a good mood and some cases, like suicides, in which I simply could not be anything more than haunted and angry. Each day was repeatedly traumatic and each night a struggle to stop my mind from spinning long enough to catch even four hours of sleep. When I did manage to fall asleep, my dreams were haunted by moments in which I eviscerated random deceased persons on the side of a highway - and, if you can believe it, that was the happiest of my dreams.  There were many nights where sleep brought me only pictures of my brother and one particularly nasty dream in which I was responsible for eviscerating Chandler. Yes...it was a long and relatively sleepless month.

But as traumatic as July was, it also made me realize just how fortunate I am to be in an institution where I have fabulous co-workers, because otherwise I could not have managed this month and come out with even a semblance of sanity. I am grateful for those that let me shut the door to the back office and simply let me be. I am grateful for those that sat and listened to me in moments where the world became far too heavy for my shoulders. And I am doubly grateful for our awesome autopsy techs who wordlessly and seamlessly stepped in and helped me with cases when I simply could not do the job on my own, no explanations necessary and no questions asked.

 So goodbye, July. While I'll miss the living people of the morgue, I can't say that I will miss the dead.

 And welcome, August.