A poem
CAUSE OF DEATH: LIVING
Description
A dead woman arrives at the mortuary hungry.
She would like two hot dogs. She notices that one of the men pushing her trolley hasn’t tied his left shoelace properly. She remembers things at inconvenient times. None of this is useful to the people trying to work out how she died.
They weigh her. Photograph her. Open her up. Test what they find. Call her mother.
There is also a button.
Nobody can explain the button.
CAUSE OF DEATH: LIVING follows one postmortem from receipt of body to cause of death, including everything that makes it into the report, and everything that doesn’t.