Free Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

any time I passed her office. In our water-cooler chats, I learned that she sewed her own clothes, which looked to me to be the height of New York fashion. She laughed at my dry humor, which not everybody did. She was bright, strong-willed, opinionated, and sometimes argumentative—my kind of woman.
    And when I told her I was just twenty-six, her jaw dropped. She’d thought I was just another bespectacled, distinguished, gray-haired old gent in his forties, nothing like the cocky, crude Italian boys on her block. I had class, she said.
    A few weeks after we met, she came to work without her ring. She told me she’d broken off her engagement. (In fact, the ring was in her purse and she hadn’t yet revealed to her fiancé that he’d been booted.) The next day I asked her out.
    She also dropped another bombshell: She was just eighteen, albeit a very intelligent and sophisticated eighteen. Apparently neither of us looked our ages.
    On one of our first dates, I picked up Theresa to go to the movies. She spied a big jar in the backseat. It was the stripped skin of a human hand floating in formaldehyde.
    Another time, we had arranged to meet at the Brooklyn morgue before our date, but Theresa refused to go inside. So I told her to wait at the back door for me. While she stood there, a morgue wagon pulled up. Two attendants pulled a dead body from the back and placed it on a gurney—then placed the dead man’s head on his chest.
    After that, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she fled screaming and never saw me again, but within a few weeks, she officially broke off her engagement to the other fellow.
    A year after we started dating, Theresa and I were married at the venerable St. Blaise Catholic Church in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. It rained right up to Theresa’s arrival, then stopped, supposedly an omen of good luck. All our Italian relatives were there, there was lots of food, and the reception looked like a scene from the movie Goodfellas .
    Back then, we were just a happy couple on the brink of our careers, but I had married a Renaissance woman. In many ways, her future was even brighter than mine: She would eventually leave her secretarial job and go to college, where she’d get a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, become an in-store designer for Neiman Marcus, work as an interior designer, and sell her custom-made jewelry to Saks Fifth Avenue. She raised two children who grew up to become a doctor and a prosecutor. Incredibly, in years to come, she’d return to college for a bachelor’s degree in nursing, work as a psychiatric nurse, be trained as a forensic nurse, and coauthor a book, Excited Delirium Syndrome , about a complex cocktail of mental and physical conditions that have proven suddenly fatal in many police arrests. Her work shed new light on the syndrome and led, in part, to its adoption as an accepted diagnosis by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the National Institute of Justice.
    And, oh, she’s an excellent cook, too.
    Sadly, we divorced briefly in later years. I married another woman who, in a fit of anger, fired four shots at me. I very nearly became a customer at the morgue. She missed, thankfully. It’s a very interesting experience, being shot at (and missed). I highly recommend it as a way to clarify your mind. You don’t hear the gun going off. I saw it, but I couldn’t hear it.
    Anyway, we quickly divorced, and I immediately reconnected with Theresa, with whom I’d never really fallen out of love. We remarried after an almost ten-year estrangement, and I am blessed to have her again at my side.
    I learned a lot during that middle period of my life. Most significant, maybe, is that when a woman pulls a gun on you, never say, “You wouldn’t dare shoot.”
    But back in those early days, before those troubles, Theresa and I were just happy to have each other. I was locked in the rigors of becoming