The Anatomy Lesson:

• The Anatomy Lesson: Overview
• The Anatomy Lesson: Skeletons and Shadows
• The Sudden Death of Eddy
• The Slow Death of Rose
• Newborns
• The Anatomy Lesson: The Dead
• The Anatomy Lesson: Drawings From The Laboratory
• The Anatomy Lesson: Memory Pictures
• The Anatomy Lesson: Dimensional Drawings
• Installations from UCSD School of Medicine
• The Brain Project (movies 2, 6, and 8)

...After the sudden death of Eddy, his wife Rose did her dying ever so slowly, in a leisurely retreat. She regressed in small, barely visible strokes, wandering through her memories, confessing her secrets, one by one. Hers was an almost typical story of Eastern European immigration from the pogroms of Poland, to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to the family brownstone homes of Brooklyn. She remembered her father taking them off the boat. "You came to Ellis Island," she said. "they examined you and if you had any sickness or sores they sent you back. You had to be perfect."

She told me of a man she loved that her father did not like. When she married, it was not the one she wanted. She even confessed she had illegally aborted her last child. Times had gotten too bad and she knew she couldn’t properly care for one more.

For five years I drew portraits of her from week to week, and year to year; more than one hundred multiple image drawings in pen and ink, which serialized her decline. From a vital 91 year old still climbing hills, she transformed to a frail 93 year old, to a 95 year old, self-consumed, skeletal and immobile. Even as the last few liquid drops seeped intravenously through plastic tubes to sustain her in her hospital bed, with her eyes closed, in the float between waking and sleeping, she would suddenly become conscious and alert. She opened her eyes. She lifted her head. She clenched her fist. She shook her fist. "I’ll put them all away before I go," she said. She gripped my hand in her bony hand tightly, and more tightly. "Life is sweet," she said. "The world is so beautiful, why would I want to leave? He’s coming for me but I don’t want to go."

She was a tough lady. Rose attacked life – opportunities, disappointments, tragedies, loyalties, even grudges – as an act of combat. She died after exhausting every resource, both medical and physical, for perhaps too long. She succumbed to a common and current notion of death as a medical failure. For Rose, death was a capture after battle, an internment, a defeat. She was defined by an indomitable will to survive.