Autopsy

Miranda Doyle

2002

I decide I want to see what is left of my father.

His brain lies in the Glasgow Southern General Neuro Pathology Department, donated to science in 2002. He died of a fast growing brain cancer. A tumour wove insidiously through the folds of cortex above his left ear. It became enmeshed with his synapses, flowering like deceit.

Professor Graham, who cut his brain from its stem, has asked me to go straight up to the Neuropathology Department on the fifth floor. It is on the first floor where men in blue scrubs, like this one, belting a vending machine, excavate brains in the living, and it is on the fifth where another band of doctors excavate them in the dead.

I press five on the button panel where once I had pressed six. Then, when Dad was alive, I shuddered upwards in the lift, and strode quickly to his ward, past a curling crayoned picture of Winnie the Pooh on a closed door of the children's room, till I stood at his window, watching his stapled skull nodding in sleep against his chest.

The lift opens onto Floor Five. There are scarred wooden double doors and the smell of the laboratory. Professor Graham gets up from where he is talking to his secretary to shake my hand. In his office we sit down opposite one another.

'Where does it live?' The question is out of me before I can think of something more sensible to ask.

'Your father's remains?' His accent is educated Scots. Clear and careful, some words paused over before chosen.

'Yes. The brain. Where do you keep it?' Professor Graham rises from his chair and walks across the corridor to another room. He returns with a shallow plastic bucket in white.

'It started out in a larger bucket, where the material was fixed. The consistency of the brain is that of jelly and very difficult to work with. Once it has been fixed it is cut into sections.'

The brain was in pieces? Professor Graham leans over and points out a book, lying open next to me on his desk.

'The brain is cut into fourteen to sixteen pieces, and arranged in this way, left to right.' The picture is black and white, and shows a full brain sliced and arranged. Perhaps it will be less gruesome to view in pieces, than as a bulk of creases and folds; recognizable as brain and as something that was once his. In my anxiety at what must come I tear on:

'I wondered why his testes have not been examined in the post mortem. Wondered whether it was a kind of man to man thing, that you left this part of him alone as a mark of respect.' Professor Graham looks at me blankly.

'Sorry, are you asking about the examination of his testes?'

'Yes. The post mortem report states that they were not examined.'

He rises, and this is the only moment the whole afternoon where he looks flustered, reaching over his desk for the post mortem report. Carefully he turns the page.

'That is an omission. I must apologize. Are you worried the cancer had spread?' 'No. It was only that it seemed a glaring omission. My father was unfaithful to my mother the whole of their married lives.' And so typical that his testes should defy that damning autopsy label of 'unremarkable'.

On the way to the lift another doctor appears from the laboratory opposite. Professor Graham says cheerily, once the doors have concertinaed closed:

'This young lady has come to discuss a donation her family have made to the department.'

The man colours and the exchange gives me the feeling that in all his years as a pathologist, and he is due for retirement in a month, Professor Graham has never experienced a mission like this.

Outside the rain has stopped. At the mortuary Professor Graham rings the bell. A shadow hobbles into view through the mottled glass and opens the door. Mr Scott has a stick. Professor Graham tells me that Mr Scott has hurt his back and Mr Scott, in white coat and blue scrubs nods.

We enter the chapel, and again Professor Graham reassures me that I may not want to see it. But there is nothing that would make me turn back now.

Mr Scott opens the door to the viewing chamber. There is a small room with no chairs, a glass panel in one wall. The window is curtained. Behind is a hospital trolley-bed pushed up beneath the glass. Covered in white linen, it carries the brain. The sections are in three rows on a white tray. Dad's label is soaked and almost unreadable with its autopsy number, name and place of death: Doyle AO30139: Ayrshire Hospice.

The tissue itself is two shades of beige. Grey and white matter has been fixed to colours never chosen for the Dulux palette. The slices increase in size from the prefrontal section through to the diced grizzle of the brain stem. The seventh slice has a small hole, the eighth a larger one, whilst the ninth and tenth show ragged edges. The cavity is enormous.

Behind me the men wait for me to speak. It is impossible to imagine that this is him, that who Dad was, and who he pretended he wasn't, collided against the fan of nerve endings, which are as clear as the roots of a tree.

I begin asking questions about the cavity and the discolouration, but I do not care what the answers are.

That I am there feels like another autopsy, one in which I should emulate Professor Graham. He has retained cassette sized sections of what was healthy to store beside what was diseased. He remained impartial in the face of a rampant brain tumour. He accepted my father as he was.