Fried chicken, potato salad, green beans slathered in bacon grease, fresh homemade rolls, pecan pie and sweet tea. Gallon upon gallon of sweet tea. The intoxicating odor of this mystical combination smells like church, family and love to me.Joey looked like a Weeble. He seemed about as wide as he was tall, with generous glasses and an intellectual demeanor. For those not of my generation, a Weeble was a children’s toy back in the 1970s. They were basically indestructible plastic eggs with some kind of figure painted on the side that were weighted slightly at the bottom. Their catchphrase was, “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” Joey looked a bit like that.
Joey was a natural peacemaker. I was the President of my med school class. Don’t be impressed with that. Somebody had to do it, and I apparently fled slower than everybody else. It fell to me to adjudicate problems.
A couple of my maturity-impaired classmates were overheard making fun of one of my female comrades based on her size. The old Army me bubbled up, and I confronted them both, ready to apply a little frontier justice. Joey physically stepped between us and assured me he would take care of it quietly. He did.
Genesis
Gross Anatomy is the starting point for every physician on the planet. No matter if you are the most esteemed world-renowned neurosurgeon or the local doc-in-a-box, everybody starts there. The experience is at once wondrous and horrifying.
They say your med school cadaver is your first real patient, and that is not an inaccurate statement. I know stuff about that lady that she didn’t. There is a near-spiritual intimacy there.
We called our cadaver Berniece. Within the first week, they all have names. Berniece was a skinny lass who smoked and clearly died of heart disease. I once was in the course director’s office and inadvertently saw Berniece’s real name. I immediately wished I hadn’t. Things worked better if she just stayed Berniece.
Gross Anatomy is at once dehumanizing and profoundly human. On the first day of Gross, everybody gets a bit green, whether they admit it or not. By the end of the first week, you could murder a pizza in the place. The human animal can acclimate to most anything.
One day, we were called upon to disarticulate the hips. That was about as much fun as it sounds and was also fairly messy. While I was struggling to get Berniece to part with her lower extremities, I looked up and saw Joey. He was marching across the gross lab, grinning madly with a human leg thrown jauntily over his shoulder. He looked like some ghoulish Oompa Loompa from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I will carry that image to the grave.
The Event
Joey wanted to be an OB/GYN, and he would have been magnificent at it. His physical presence and general demeanor were utterly disarming. Women trusted him. He had a gift.
During the fourth year of med school, you interview for residency. I had my family established, so I didn’t interview anywhere except the hospital where I had already trained. Joey, by contrast, traveled to Hershey, Penn., to vie for a residency spot.
The weather was bad. There was a traffic accident. Joey was killed. I will never forget that phone call. It left me physically ill.
Joey was from a tiny little Mississippi crossroads in the middle of no place. All 100 of his classmates carpooled out for the service. We all fought back tears, some more successfully than others.
Joey got into med school on his third try. His sister had a chronic illness, and this drove his passion. They read the extraordinary essay from his application to med school at the funeral. It was agonizing to hear.
When the service wrapped up, we filed by to hug Joey’s mom and took a peek into his bedroom. They lived right next to the church, and she had left it just as it had been when he grew up. He was such a great kid.
The drive back to the med school was nearly two hours. We were all hungry and emotionally spent. The pastor of the little church insisted on our coming through the fellowship hall before we left.
There we found a simply breathtaking Southern feast. The ladies of that tiny church had pulled together enough food to feed all 100 of us a couple times over. Across those eight-foot folding tables were mashed potatoes, English peas, macaroni casserole, and hand-tossed salad, but it was so much more than that. There was love there, in simply breathtaking quantities, all of it wrapped around the remarkably brief life of an extraordinary young man.