pugilistic stance

you could say i got my degree in forensic science for the content

When a person truly perishes in a fire, the heat causes their muscles to constrict the way meat shrinks while it cooks. This forces them into the fetal position with arms pulled in close and fists in their face like a boxer in defence. That’s why it’s called pugilistic stance: pugil is Latin for fist-fighter. I love that we made a new term that in some ways honours the soul and spirit of the fatal burn victim; they didn’t go out with the peace of a child in the womb but with arms up protecting the soft cartilage of the face, never once not fighting.

For extra credit in my forensic pathology class, we got to witness an autopsy, fill out an autopsy report, and determine the cause and manner of death. They expected to use a victim of natural causes as an example but there just wasn’t a suitable body so we watched the autopsy of a man who had fallen from the top of some scaffolding at the airport that morning. We took an inventory of his pockets; he had like twenty five dollars in colourful plastic CDN bills. That’s one of the first things that really stuck with me, just imagining the lunch not purchased or coffee not ordered.

The other thing that stuck with me was that after he had his abdomen unzipped, and his ribcage buzz sawed open, my professor held his heart in her latex-gloved hands and pointed out the signs of cardiomegaly — how his age and lifestyle had contributed to conditions that led to the thickening of his heart as it worked overtime to pump blood and oxygen throughout his body — how death was already soon coming for him. How his heart was just working so hard it grew bigger and bigger and would one day stop. And then onto the tray with the other organs it went and we were moving along.