scheduling it all.

My life has a very tight schedule right now. Moving from my home that had all of my suits and shirts and socks and shoes neatly tucked away in my nice and tidy closet has not served me well. My roles are now fractionalized into little parts in much the same way. Where my clothes used to be all in the same place and seamlessly moved from one day to the next I now find my roles jumbled in the same way. Time and schedules are my life. I don't like it very much but this is what I have chosen and I shall persevere.

When I was living in ________ I worked for a big university. My job was to receive, embalm, catalog, maintain and store the dead human remains of those who had donated their bodies to science. My other duty was to make these bodies ready and available for thousands of students to dissect and study. It went sort of like this:

Being on call those days was simply wearing a pager and possessing a huge notebook filled with names. These names belonged to those who had successfully signed up with the anatomy bequest program. If one of these people died, we would be contacted by a family member (or their proxy) and let us know that this person was ready to be taken into the program. We would then make sure that they were in the book and if they still qualified. Just because you were on the list did not mean that you were still qualified...height and weight were a factor here. If some one had become gigantic in the last few years on the earth they could be rejected. If they had shriveled into a dusty husk, they could also be denied. If they were still at the optimum weight/height/meat ratio a funeral home (who we had contracted with) would remove them from their place of death. These undertakers would bring them to us and we would begin the process of preservation.

The process for anatomically embalming a body versus cosmetically or traditionally embalming a body is absolutely night and day. We used a preservative fluid that I liked to refer to as jet fuel. It was mostly phenol (or carbolic acid) with some isopropyl alcohol and H2O as carriers. It was awesome stuff, just being in the same room with it flowing scented you quite permanently. Showers helped but really only time allowed the smell to ware off. It was always fun to go from the lab to class and watch people move away to desks farther from what was emanating from my person. I got to a point that I would not even change back into street clothes and attend all of my classes in scrubs.

What happened after embalming was really just the beginning. The bodies were beginning the process of becoming cadavers. This is apparently the term used when dead human remains are used for scientific study. Studied they were. After stewing for a while (typically a month or so) in a new state of bloated unrecognizableness the bodies were moved into new homes, the dissection table. This would be their domicile for a good two years depending on the condition of the tissues.

The cadavers would always begin with students on the path to become doctors. These were definitely the most childish and demanding of all of the students because they were training to be doctors and that particular style of entitlement and snobbery starts early. Beyond that the bodies would move down the chain of command eventually landing with elementary anatomy students who occasionally passed out from the site of something so foreign.

The care of these cadavers was quite an undertaking and would not have been possible without much planning and scheduling. Our lab lived and died by a giant wall calendar and a set of daily responsibilities. Cleaning the rooms, hydrating the bodies, cleaning the tables, cremating the spent ones and doing the laundry were all duties that we all undertook as a team. It was a good team. One of members of that team died a few years ago in a very tragic car accident. Writing this now and thinking of her and the crazy times we had together makes me cry. I will be drinking a Heineken for Erica Pagel tonight. She was a good friend. I miss her presence on this earth.

At this point in my life I was becoming incredibly disenfranchised by the mortuary program that I was involved in. I became much more involved in the study of religion, film, art, pinball and beer. By taking the live grieving human out of the scenario and replacing the dead loved ones name with a serial number, I became quite cold and disheartened. It was not long before I dropped out of school and went to work full time at the lab. This was not probably the best idea I had ever had. Changing this plan was necessary but not without friction. On one hand I had to get out of my schedule to maintain sanity but on the other hand it compromised my ability to move forward in what I had thought was my destiny. Sometimes destiny takes detours.

There really is nothing quite like sorting through hundreds of dissection tables full of butts, thighs and back-fat to turn you off to the majesty of the corpse. Human anatomy is really quite beautiful as long as you don't cut it up into big slabs of oily mottled chunks and spend 16 hours placing it into 27 cremation containers for a 30 mile trip to the retort in a rented moving van. Those sorts of days tend to wear on ones soul. Sometimes, however, you do what you gotta do.

Schedules. My new schedule goes a little like this: I work for ten days in a row and then I get 4 days off. Of those 10 I am on call for 6. I have my children every other week from Friday to Friday and 4 of those days are my days off. I live with my parents in the house that I grew up in. I am completely broke. Unfettered free time to myself has completely disappeared. When I am not responsible for my kids I am responsible to the dead and their families. Trying to live in this town while you are getting separated from someone that you have been with for 14 years is the best possible scenario you could have for an award winning soap-opera. You can't turn around without having to explain to someone why "it is OK and everything is going fine and the kids are adjusting well".

I made this mess. This is all my fault. The "new" aspects to this schedule are born from very huge and life changing decisions.

Most of the time people do not get to choose when these mind altering, direction destroying blows come, these things are more often than not, completely out of our control. Whether someone's loved one dies unexpectedly or disease slowly ravages them over time, the inevitable change to "the schedule" is not a choice, it is simply a reality.

I know that my decision to change my life has directly impacted other people's lives as well. Many of those impacts have been painful and direct. Parts of me are sorry that those things had to happen. Parts of me know that those changes to those lives would have happened in time anyway, with or without my participation. To me, right now, it has been very important to look inwardly and address what I can do to not make some of the mistakes I may or may not have made in the past. My life schedule is a direct representation of choices that I have made over the years of my life.

The schedule has to change. We can't actually believe that these processes and paths that we have chosen are the best way forever can we? Many times things change because there was something seriously wrong with the process. Lives do not move forward when cancer goes unchecked. If the system is compromised and the system fails to be corrected, the system will cease to operate. Relationships are much like bodies, if they are not healthy, they will die. Schedules are important if they serve to keep the plan on the right track. If the schedule is serving to maintain failure, the schedule is poison.

I recently spoke to my old boss at the anatomy bequest program in ____________. We spoke of old times and what has changed. As far as I could tell, not much had. They were now computerized and most of the calendar was synced to PDA's that students used. For the most part that lab ran exactly like it did when I worked there 15 or so years ago. The only change to the schedule in that system is that I was not a part of it. I don't think the program flinched at all.

Whew.