The words from the other end of the phone are echoing like thunder in the back of my head.
We've been investigating your husband's heart...there is no known cause of death... we want to have an answer for you... it's a very interesting case... we are continuing our study... we are sending his heart to the top specialist in the country...
Today, the image of my husband's body lying on the table in the emergency room is replaced by the image of this one organ, my husband's physical heart... The rest of his body is dust and ashes, his other organs donated, but his physical heart, almost a year later, is being kept in sterile fridges or freezers or portable boxes...?
When I first got through to the coroner's office, the woman on the other end of the line reminded me of someone working in a hair salon, chewing gum, saying honey, and darlin' to everyone. I had this image of a white, sterile medical examination clinic, like one pictured in movies or TV shows, with this vibrant woman, adding colour with her makeup and hair clips and painted nails. What a terrible stereotype. What a contrasting, yet fitting, dynamic she brought to the image in my head...
Two phone calls later, after speaking with two examiners involved in the investigation (as they call it), after almost a year's worth of testing... it is most likely that we are dealing option #1. I cannot remove the no known cause echo, that persists in the back of my mind, leaving my head throbbing and my jaw tight...
The examiners were kind and sensitive. They said things like, We cannot imagine how hard this is... We are going to keep testing until there are no more tests... We want to have an answer for you... Talking to them reminded me of the many phone calls made in those first few months trying to cancel Lynn's accounts. It took an age and a day to get a certain company to cancel Lynn's cell phone account. They wouldn't talk to me. Finally, when they heard he had died, they said, Well we shouldn't even be speaking to you since your name is not on the account... Like they needed to remind me how gracious and generous they were being even to receive my phone call. Weeks later, after travelling to the out-of-town store location, then from there, sending faxes through to the main branch, it was very clear that they had no idea what to do with an account when a person died. Don't people die? I wanted to say. How can you be so awkward and unprepared as though you've never heard of a person dying before?? I wanted to say, Why are you making this so difficult for me when it is most certainly not in your favor to continue charging a dead person's, no longer existing, bank account!
Those people had no idea what to do with death. At least the coroners were practiced in the domain of grief and the bereaved...
...no known cause... no known cause...
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