Author Lisa Knopp shows how we can be drawn to the presence of a body even following death in Hospital Drive‘s “Leaving the Body.” After her mother dies, Knopp lingers in her hospice room, asking to stay as a woman enters to wash her mother’s body and ready her “for the people who are coming to pick her up soon.”
Knopp initially wonders about “the point of bathing my mother, since her body will soon be ash.” The nurse’s aide speaks to Knopp’s mother as she wipes her face and arms. Knopp finds this “comforting, this informing my mother of what’s about to be done to her, since I can feel that something of her is still here.”
When the aides remove the woman’s gown, Knopp is filled with wonder at her mother’s naked body. “Even though she would feel shamed by my scrutiny, I want to savor and memorize the details.” This body holds memories for Knopp, the substance of a mother-child relationship, connection: “I know their shape so well: large knee bones, slightly bowing calves, like those of her mother, and thick ankles. Just below her right knee on her inner calf is a blue vein, an inch or two long that has been there as long as I can remember.”
In these moments right after her mother’s death, Knopp finds herself “starving for her physicality” and tells the aide she’d like to touch her mother. She kisses her forehead and strokes the top of her head and wonders, “What is it that I’ll be missing now that my mother’s heart has stopped beating, and she’ll soon be turned to ash?” Her mother has died, but Knopp is still drawn to her physical body, the familiarity of her mother’s form that will cease to exist. Knopp shares that her greatest regret will be that “we didn’t spend more time in each other’s physical presence” and that this final sponge bath is her “last chance to see and touch and smell my mother, flesh of my flesh, my first home.”
Knopp recalls all of the beautifully mundane things she and her mother chatted about on the phone, though they rarely discussed her cancer or the grander questions Knopp yearned to ask her dying mother. The loss Knopp highlights in her essay isn’t so much about the flesh itself, but more about her experience of her mother that was contained in that body: her “voice, words, thoughts, laughter, and silences.”
Knopp reflects on the waning importance of physicality in our modern world, how the dean of her college encourages faculty to have more screen time and less face time with students, how so many interactions with friends are via social media and not in person.
At the end of the essay, Knopp combs out her mother’s hair, braids it with care and cuts a lock of hair as a token. Knopp is unsure what she will do with the lock of hair, but the gesture seems satisfying in the moment, keeping “more than just memories of her body” before they wheel her away.
Writing Prompt: If you’ve been present with a dead body, either a loved one or a patient, what did you experience while in that space? Was it difficult? Healing? Both? Did you feel drawn to touch the body, as Knopp did? What are your thoughts about Knopp’s observation that we spend significantly less time face-to-face? How do you think spending less time in the physical presence of others might affect us? Write for 10 minutes.