Sport 38 essay now online
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has now uploaded the contents of Victoria University Press’s Sport 38 to the interwebs.
That issue includes my essay, “Missing the Dead,” a small sample of which appears below:
Last summer a friend of mine earned his living cutting corneas out of dead bodies. The company he worked for would page him when a patient was pronounced dead and he would drive from wherever he was to remove the corneas, put them into a little plastic jar specifically designed for the procedure, and deliver them to a central office until some medical emergency or another could make use of them.
Sometimes my friend would do the operation in a hospital room, sometimes in the morgue. A security guard looking over his shoulder once asked, ‘Will the person who gets those be able to see what this guy saw?’ It’s easy to mock a question like that. We’re supposed to know better, to understand what it means when a body dies. But even the most hardened medical professionals, if they’re honest, have to admit some degree of ignorance about death. There are questions that the science of it doesn’t address, matters of language more than anything.
You may read the essay its entirety here.
