Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal.

You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret.

The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a way that few other people understand, yet at the same time you don’t know them at all.

The descriptions are so minute, so detailed. The hair: how long is it and what color? The torso: is it fat or thin; does it have remarkable tattoos or scars or markings? The private parts: are they typical or somehow unusual?

Inside, there are reconstructions of the moment of death, and clues about how they died. An injury. Perhaps bruising or marking. Red eyes or broken teeth, a doctor divining the truth from the way the blood behaves.

There are other stories in the description, too: signs of somebody’s behavior, their past indiscretions, history evidenced through injuries and bones and the footprint of medical intervention or substance use.

Yet sometimes the things that we use to define us are entirely missing, uninteresting. Hair color might be noted, but the eyes? Their color is rarely important.

It’s even worse, somehow, when there’s a crime involved. A person dies once, usually suddenly and often unexpectedly, ripped out of existence by somebody else’s hand. Then somehow they are killed all over again by a doctor pillaging what’s left of them in the search for evidence.

I read an medical examiner’s report recently that broke me a little. A man, just a few years younger than I am, killed unexpectedly. There were twelve pages of information from the medical examiner, details of the autopsy and several paragraphs noting his injuries. The examination toured his body with the usual lack of emotion.

Parts of his body were deemed “unremarkable.” His hands, fingers, unremarkable. His feet, toes, toenails, unremarkable.

I thought about his toes in the ocean, wiggling as the cold water rushed over them. I thought about his hands touching a loved one, encouraging a child, consoling a friend. What’s unremarkable about that?

The mundane documents of science and bureaucracy have a way of flattening the most powerful things, reducing their dimensions. Being detached is their power, and their failure. If you look at research papers describing the most vile experiments, they seem barely different from the reports of an everyday scientist: Tuskegee explained in banal detail, thousands of men’s health and lives turned into data points. Or if you read court proceedings where officials are describing heinous acts committed against the most vulnerable, the forensic detail makes it seem almost commonplace, somehow inevitable.

I finished that autopsy report and sat for a few minutes, silent. What must life be like for the doctors and coroners and medical examiners? What does it do to a person to be so detached? How do we balance the important stories we can see from the meaningful ones we cannot?