A New Life

I’ve been remarried for about 7 months now.  Life is great!! I really cannot say enough about Kristin and what a wonderful person she is.  She has done an absolutely fabulous job as a mother to these children.  Truly, I could not ask her to do any more than what she is already doing.  The beauty of the situation is that the kids reciprocate to her as if she was their birth mother.  She is the ingredient that my family has been missing for the past 5 years.

As far as my grief goes, most days are good.  I recognize that I will always have a part of me that is gone now that Becca is gone.  Time helps.  You learn to cope with the pain and recognize the heartache you feel.  My feelings for Kristin don’t diminish how I feel toward Rebecca.  I compare it to having another child.  Just because you love one doesn’t mean that you can’t love the other equally as much.  There is no comparing or judging who is better.  I have married two very capable, intelligent woman.  Just like I could never say, or even think for that matter “I like one of my children more than the other.”  I would not say that for Rebecca or Kristin.

I have had a couple of bludgeoning experiences over the past month or two though.  The first one came as I was touring a dental school in Mesa AZ, AT Still University.  They took me into their ‘anatomy’ lab.  They had 4 cadavers out in the open.  Only one was exposed and the other 3 bodies were covered with white sheets.  The lab reeked of formaldehyde.  The dead bodies looked like Becca’s.  I didn’t realize that during dental school that I was going to be dissecting the human body, specifically the neck and head.  I suppose I just had never thought about it before.  The dental students get the neck and head while the medical school students get the rest of the body.  Dental students dissect the neck and head and then get their very own human skull to take home and study during the course of their didactics.  I guess there is just a certain amount of ‘creep’ factor to this.  The very first dead body I had ever seen was Rebecca’s.  I never wanted to see another after that.  Then my dad passed away last year.  I helped the mortician dress him.  Perhaps I’m gaining a little bit of tolerance to it.

A few weeks ago I started reading a book called Stiff: the curious life of human cadavers, by Mary Roach.  It was a mildly interesting read.  I thought it was okay.  She was attempting to make it humorous but I thought it was rather brash and callus.  In her book, Mary Roach did say that you have to sort of gain a bit of emotional detachment to the cadaver, you can’t think of it as an actual human body.

I suppose this is just something to emotionally prepare for when the time comes.

From conversations with both doctor and dentist friends of mine they have expressed how initially they were slightly repulsed by the idea of carving up a human body, however they claim it gives a renewed sense of respect for the body.  Also it is quite helpful once you are an actual treating doctor/dentist.