Some Things Don’t Decompose

You don’t forget your first autopsy. Not if you’re paying attention.

I wasn’t new to this.

I’d been an operating room tech, a firefighter EMT, even a coroner’s assistant. I’ve cracked ribs doing CPR. Passed clamps in brain surgery. Hauled bodies out of wrecks at 3 a.m.

But this was different.

Gunshot to the head. Seventeen years old. Found slumped in his car, still parked. His girlfriend had broken up with him just hours before. Some people say that doesn’t explain it. But grief doesn’t ask permission. It just pulls the trigger.

At the autopsy, it wasn’t the medical examiner who made you sick—it was the assistant.

She took the scalpel and carved a rough crescent from ear to ear. Then, with two gloved hands, she peeled the scalp forward like she was turning down the hood of a jacket. The entire flap—hair and all—slid over the boy’s face.

That sound. A wet, slow unzipping. Like peeling skin from fruit—but wrong.

I’ve heard people scream. I’ve felt ribs crack under my hands. I’ve heard saws hit bone.

But that sound—that peel—is one of the worst in the world.

The Stryker saw shrieked to life. The skull opened. The brain came out in silence.

Some violence doesn’t scream. It hums. It files paperwork. It sterilizes the table.

It wasn’t the first one I’d seen. Years earlier, in the OR, I assisted on a living woman’s brain surgery. Music played overhead. Surgeons hummed. That brain had a pulse. This one did not.

The cop leaned in and swabbed gunshot residue from the boy’s fingers. The examiner weighed the organs, labeled them, diced them into samples. The rest—heart, liver, lungs—were dumped into an orange biohazard bag and stuffed back inside like groceries into a sack. They sewed him up with twine-thick thread. He looked more like a prop than a person.

Systems sanitize what they can’t justify. But the harm is still zipped inside.

Then I drove him home.

Not the only time I’ve watched a body get processed.

You start to recognize patterns. The way institutions treat bodies—human or animal—when the goal is data, not dignity. When the outcome matters more than the being. That autopsy wasn’t the first time I’d seen it. And it wouldn’t be the last.

Years before that, I walked through unmarked doors into a hidden animal testing facility. Told them I was doing a paper. Lied—because truth gets you locked out. The director thought I was on his side. He gave me the tour.

Steel tables. CO₂ kill chambers. A catalog of designer mice bred for suffering. He bragged about how inspections always came with a heads-up. How they moved the primates out early so no one had to see.

No screams. No blood. Just sanitized cruelty under fluorescent lights.

Where ethics are optional and pain is procedural.

It reminded me of the autopsy room.

There’s a kind of violence that doesn’t kick down the door. It just fills out forms, keeps receipts, hums along to the radio while it opens your skull.

And yet—I remember. The boy. The lab. The bodies that never spoke but still taught me how to see.

The body count isn’t always visible. But it’s here.

The body count isn’t always visible. But it’s here.

In the species vanished without a study. The lab animals unrecorded. The fieldwork that becomes PR. The autopsy rooms of policy.

Conservation isn’t just about protecting what’s left alive. It’s about refusing to let erasure become the norm.

The real work?

Standing in the room when no one else wants to look.

And remembering the sound.

Related Reading:

The Animal Welfare Paradox – What happens when cruelty hides behind clean cages and good intentions.