La Muerte

As October approaches, I am sure that every Wal-Mart, Target and Hallmark store is setting out their cheesy Halloween decorations. Accordingly, Mexican stores are preparing for the upcoming semi-morbid holiday. A common misconception is that El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) is simply the Mexican equivalent of Halloween. False.
While Halloween decorations and costumes are also available here, the more important holiday is November 2nd. The most well-known image of this holiday is La Catarina.

Celebration of this holiday involves decorating the graves of family members with food, gifts, and marigolds and combines pre-Hispanic traditions with Catholic holy days. Although the imagery seems a little gruesome and morbid by American standards, the Mexican perspective on death is quite different and skeletons are not so much creepy as a reminder of where we all start and end.
Ok, the culture lesson is over. The conference on Death and Dying in Mexico that all the Notre Dame students attended this weekend was dually relevant because of the upcoming holiday and the fact the all but one of us is a pre-med major. To be honest, we were less than enthusiastic to spend our Friday and Saturday listening to lectures about death and the coffee break was definitely the highlight for some attendees. 
Then we went to the morgue.
I was a tad bit concerned that I would faint (as I am known to do) or be so bothered by the Cadaver Workshop that I would have to give up on the whole medical career thing and become an Arts & Letters major. Luckily, that was not the case and I had a fantastic time! The supervising professor and his assistants eased us into the whole experience with some basic anatomy, passing around of some human femurs, suture practice on Styrofoam cups, and dissection time with pig hearts. It turns out that all of my years of passing the time by making friendship bracelets set me up to be a quick learning for tying stitches. All of this in and of itself was quite the hands-on adventure for all of us pre-med majors who have never done more than dissect fetal pigs in Biology lab. But this was just the introduction. We were then directed to the other side of the room, where a partially dissected cadaver was waiting on a table. It was a little disconcerting at first to be so close to a dead body, especially because I was standing right next to the face. The student assistant was very encouraging in a get-your-hands-dirty sort of way and we were all soon poking around, identifying organs and following the maze of the circulatory system. More than anything else, I was amazed by the way that everything fits together perfectly. A close second on the ¨Most Important Realization¨ list was how little I know and how much there is to learn. When we had finished, we got to flex our newly-found surgeon muscles and stitch the cadaver closed. I was definitely ready to leave by the end of the workshop (partially because it was 2PM and way past lunchtime) but I am THRILLED that we were able to experience something that is usually only available to students in medical school. 
P.S. I was going to entitle this blog with some morbid pun, but decided that was probably in bad taste. Chao!