God's Autopsy

an inquest for the ages

There has always been chirping about the Nietzschean concept of God being declared dead by the advent of the Enlightenment, or capitalism, or moral relativism. That is silly. God has physically perished, but not due to some human ideology or economic system.

I confess I was nervous. Being a forensic pathologist intern was a breeze: I got to sit in on autopsies of suspected foul play victims, overdosers, and middle-aged starlets consigned to rifle through B-movie scripts. I even made donut runs, which allowed me to catch up on my podcasts and get away from all the blood and guts.

But when I got called to do my first solo autopsy, because the chief county medical examiner had his son's bar mitzvah on the day of The Tragedy, I didn't in my wildest nightmare expect that I would be called upon to dissect God.

But dissect God was what I did.

This special calling-upon became my cross. I bore it with fatigue. I bore it with petulance. I did not want to bear it at all.

For such a long time, I wantes to go through the steps that regular medical examiners go through. I wanted to be the one to help the police department solve the murder. I wanted to be the one to bring closure to the family that hoped their prodigal son hadn't willingly done himself in with fentanyl. This would make me out as the morbid backdoor hero, the saturnine guy who does all the inglorious work but retains his hairline.

Mostly, I wanted to be seen on TV pushing the gurney with the cool navy blue windbreaker that said ‘COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’ in yellow letters, and with a cool Joseph Abboud tie.

I sighed a deep sigh and got to work. I started with the ballistics phase of the examination. No foreign objects were found upon his person. No exit wounds existed anywhere. God was of medium build, slightly on the tall side. Of the three body types, He could be considered an endomorph. In other words, somewhat big-boned, round of shoulders, and given to a pear shape if He didn't watch his glycemic index and shirked on his HIIT training with medicine balls and sprints alongside Elijah.

I then began the internal examination by hefting the bone saw and cutting a Y incision. I cracked open the chest cavity with a pair of rib shears. There was an inordinate amount of bile built up around God's pericardium. This was likely due to being so stressed all the time.

He also had extremely high levels of cortisol. I couldn't rule out the possibility that God had died from heart disease. Heart disease is the number one killer in men over forty. Now I don't know what age God was pushing, but he was no spring chicken. I'd have got him on Lipitor asap.

God, if you can hear me from the grave, I wish to say something. I know disciples are stupid and weak. I mean, not ten days out of Egypt, Aaron, brother of Moses, decided it wise to strike up a golden idol for the people. What a dumbshit. I know, I know. Even the way he spelled his name hinted at his elevator not going all the way to the top penthouse. Two As? What's up with that? Is the A, or the Aleph, not good enough to get its point across with only one? Why should it have to double up? Dumbass, indeed. But know this, God: it was your alphabet.

Did you need two floods to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah? Didn't think so. One and done, son.

And the deal with the incense—Nadab and Abihu. Again, bona fide dipshits. But smiting dudes over sparklers? Come on, God. I'm no one to tell you how to run a universe. I have Russian sauce on my shirt as I type this up. (Some people give me a pass because they mistake it for watered-down blood.) But I know the difference between tracing dicks in the night air and desecrating the Holy of Holies.

But back to the autopsy.

God's chest cavity had proven tough to pry open. Once I had determined the impossibility of an aneurysm or arteriosclerosis, I wanted to dispel any possibility of foul play. So I took a break, resting my forearms while finishing an entire Rueben sandwich in a shameless bout of comfort-eating.

When done eating, I went to work on removing the organs. In so doing, extracting and weighing the liver made me at once fill out the toxicology report.

Guys: God was a dispomaniac. Extensive cirrhosis and a blood alcohol level of 0.4 meant that He was absolutely comatosed at the point of death, aka perimortem inebriation.

Did that rule out foul play? From a toxicological POV, yes. There were no traces of arsenic, strychnine, or cyanide. One can't help imagine that during a celestial block party, the Archangel Rafael was feeding him shots of Don Julio 70 from the east. This does not mean that He cannot make his own decisions and is not responsible for what He puts in His own mouth. So that part of the case is closed. All archangels, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, and lesser forms of angels are in the clear.

I then cracked open the cranium with a skull key and removed God's brain. I weighed it on the scale, measured its circumference (slightly above average) with the calipers, and felt around for abnormalities among the gray matter. And abnormalities I found. Well, an abnormality.

Starting from the prefrontal cortex and ending across the parietal lobes on either side, we're blotches of discoloration that resembled the arms of spiral galaxies. The entire stretch of discoloration itself also had a spiraling edge, like a Mandelbrot Set. In other words, the Fibonacci Sequence that informs all of nature with a golden mean algorithm, clearly lay sprawled across the surface of God's brain. That may not have amounted to proof of my subject's godhood, but it sure was a start in pointing out His anomalous nature.

I then perused the interior of the cranium. Nothing out of the ordinary. After placing the brain back into the cavity and stapling the crown of the cranium shut, I noticed an eyelid had opened a tad. With a small speculum, I pried the eye wide open to see that God's eye was hazel. Moving over to the other eye, I found it to be blue.

God, ladies and gentlemen, had heterochromia. Could this be a sign of schizophrenia as well? Could all the contradictory decrees and tantrums be the results of a conflict not only in His genetic code, but in His temperament? Unfortunately, the histological evidence showed Him to be stone-cold, which meant a CAT scan of his brain to determine trauma or deficiency was out of the question. So we will never know.

It had been a rough morning. Left to my own devices, with my boss away at his son's bar mitzvah and the media still in the dark about the incident, I decided to finish up. I came to the portion of the autopsy that I felt most comfortable with. That would be the suturing. My boss often allowed me to take the reins with the nylon while he wrapped up the inquest. I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As I was imagining watching Netflix while munching on stadium butter popcorn on my couch, I heard a wheezing come from the corpse.

As I groaned while fishing out from a drawer the Foley catheter to drain His bladder, I realized that I would never determine His cause of death. I would find out He was full of piss and vinegar. But that was not the cause of death.

Beating myself up for the grave error of having sutured the corpse back up with all the internal fluids intact, I realized that God has always been a mystery. His nature and purpose have always been mysteries. Why should His death be any different?

I cut myself some slack. Rookie mistake. I would do better next time. In the meantime, I had more work to do. I may never ever finish. Like, ever. I may be here for all eternity.

I need more coffee. Where is my Thermos? Have you seen my Thermos?

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