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March/April 2005 Featured Stories
Forever Ours – a Forensic Pathologist's perspective on immortality and living

by Miriam Knight interviews Janis Amatuzio, M.D.

Dr. Janis Amatuzio is a forensic pathologist & coroner from Minnesota. Despite or perhaps because of her occupation, everything about this pretty, petite woman is positive, spiritual and life-affirming. I didn’t so much interview her, as just sat back, enthralled, and listened. I fully expect Forever Ours, her book about the experiences of everyday people with death and departed spirits, to become a bestseller.
---Miriam Knight

Miriam: First I want to say that I really loved your book, and what I think I liked most was the fact that the people whose stories you tell are unbiased; they have nothing to do with psychics or the metaphysical world, and they come from every walk of life.

Janis: Yes, just average folks, and this experience seems, in so many different ways, to be universal, and so incredibly reassuring. It really makes you realize that it’s not "good bye"; it’s "until we meet again."

I was so greatful to these people for telling me their experiences. The conversations I had with them were so intimate, with our one connection being their loved one. My job is to speak for the person who has died – not be a witness for the prosecution or for the defense, but to give a voice for those who cannot speak. And as I’ve said so many times before, my job is really to: say ‘who are you’ and make a positive ID; and, using the best scientific tools I have, to explain what happened. Beyond that, it is helping people get back to meaningful living, because I know that grief is kind of like a wound. And when people don’t have it completely cleaned out and all of their questions answered, they don’t heal up correctly. It’s almost like an abcess – it festers.

I had a lady come back to me five years after her daughter had died in a car crash the night before high school graduation. She called me and asked to see the autopsy photos, and I went, "oohh, I don’t usually show those to people. Must we go there?" I asked her what’s the issue, and she said, "I was so distraught that I never went to the funeral, and I never had a chance to see her. Do you have a photo of her, even in the car?" I found one and I remember the day I put the slide in the Kodachrome projector. I shined it up on the wall; she looked at it, and got up and walked to the wall; she cupped her hand around her daughter’s face, and told her how much she loved her, and wept. And then she said, "Thank you. I’d never been able to face that. I can go on living now."

We know that we heal, though I don’t think any physician knows how or why we heal; but I think that I’m there to help the healing process. The loved ones would want us to get back to full living – loving and living. If I can help answer those questions, they can help heal those wounds, and they can get back to living.

When I was in Internal Medicine – I did that before I went into pathology – I observed that surgeons coming out of the operating room would speak to family members. I was truly astonished when I went into pathology that here we did this intimate examination – I mean an autopsy is the most intimate exam you could ever have – and yet forensic pathologists would never call family members. They would wait until the death certificate was filed, and just write a letter. And I thought to myself that as long as I don’t compromise the law enforcement investigation, I am going to call families. That was really a novel event for them. So I began calling families of accident victims, suicides, deaths that turned out to be natural, but we couldn’t explain what had happened from the death scene, and that’s what really started this dialog and a relationship. And I have to tell you when I started doing it, I almost quit, it was so hard. Because, while I’m doing the best a doctor can do telling them what we did and what we found, every now and then I’d come up against that old "Why?" and all that grief. But, you know, I’m glad that I persisted, because just occasionally, not often but occasionally, they would tell me one of these extraordinary stories.

I’ve long wondered how to do this type of medicine and stay conscious; stay caring and not become, you know, hardened. I started off writing down these stories for myself, because they comforted me. I’ve realized that I’d been given this extraordinary gift of being able to hear these stories and so I decided to share them.

I love Eckhart Tolle’s quote, "Death is not the opposite of life; life has no equal. Death is the opposite of birth, and it is just a period of safer transformation." Perhaps we can begin looking at death differently as well, and see it as yet another transition, and after our period of natural grief, we can really celebrate the life and the love of our loved one. I think it was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who said that if we dare to love, we have to have the courage to grieve, and that is absolutely true. Our grief honors our love.

But these experiences that I’ve been able to record never fail to amaze me. I continue to hear them. I heard a wonderful experience from a physician, believe it or not, that really to me signified the words of Albert Einstein, when he said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. I haven’t included it in this book, but I had to lecture to the Minnesota Medical Association, the last lecture of the weekend, and afterwards one physician waited until all the others had left. This doctor was in his mid to late seventies, and he wanted to tell me a story about his father.

"My dad" he said, "loved to laugh. He would get together with his brothers or his friends, and they would tell jokes till the tears would roll down their cheeks and they were gasping for breath. Well, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, before the days of the PSA blood test, the ultrasounds and the bone scans, and before hospice and DNR (Do Not Rescuscitate). And for the last eight months of my father’s life I never heard him laugh, because when it was diagnosed it had already spread to the bone, and it was so painful for him.

"Mother had already died, and dad had had a lot of trouble with pain and pain control. When my dad was close to terminal I admitted him to the hospital where I was practising. I recall," he said, "that we admitted him to die. That’s what we did back then, and there was no such thing as DNR. You just did what you had to do. I had one associate, and only the two of us covered the whole little hospital. One night I had gotten off call and my partner was on duty. Dad was in the hospital and he was doing all right. I had just got home and sat down to dinner when the phone rang. I picked it up as usual, and the nurse said ‘Come quick! Something has happened to your father.’

"I jumped in the car, left it running at the front door. I ran down the hall, and when I got to my father’s room where they were rescuscitating him I had the most incredible experience. Two things happened simultaneously. When I got to the door, I looked in the room to the left, and there was my father’s bed, and the nurses were around it with their backs to me. My partner was on the other side, his eyes looking at me, and he was doing chest compression. At that exact moment, to my right I heard the biggest belly laugh from my father - like I hadn’t heard in months. It was joyful; it was joy itself, and it was so loud it filled the room. And I knew in an instant that dad was fine and he was not in that lifeless body. I walked in, and I said to my partner, ‘Stop the rescuscitation now.’ And my partner said to me, ‘Oh, so you heard it too…’"

The old doctor said to me, "I haven’t been afraid of death since. I miss my dad but I know he’s just fine. That experience changed my life."

It has been those little gifts that have truly comforted me and helped me do this job with a real sense of joy; of knowing that I’m closer to the pulse of life than I have ever dreamed I would be.

Every time I lecture on these stories, people will come up and say to me, "Doc, I thought I was gonna learn something here today, but you know, it’s all so familiar." And that’s why I often say – to the distress of the publisher – you don’t need my book. You already know this. You just need to remember it. If it helps you remember, that’s fine, but you already know it.

Miriam: Yes, but I do think that the service you have done is telling these stories from a particular, unassailable point of view.

Janis: Well, we do like to think of ourselves as the final word, but I do get shot down a lot. (laughs) In my discipline we’re trained to observe and not judge. You get to a certain point in your practice are you are thought by your colleages to have done enough to begin to teach, but when I first started talking about these things, I thought I’d be laughed off the forensic planet.

Miriam: How have your colleages reacted?

Janis: I was at dinner with a sheriff last week, and he said, "I think your book is great, Janis, but just don’t bring your beliefs into my office." But he doesn’t know me. Another sheriff contributed a story to this book. I’ve had a doctor say to me, "Great book. Well written, but I don’t believe a word of it." I asked him what he thought, and he said, "Oh, we’re road kill." But those are the two exceptions. The majority of the things I have heard are things like, "Janis, how could I have missed this?" or "Oh, these stories comforted me so much."

I had a chaplain come to see me wanting the book. She had had a profound out-of-body experience when she had attmpted suicide. She said to me, "I have to buy your book." I asked her why, and she said "Well I was taking care of a lady in the hospital, and she told me that if I was going to be a chaplain, I must read the book. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I read it and I’m no longer afraid to die.’"

And then she tells me about why she bacame a chaplain. She had been in a bad relationship, had attempted suicide, was in an E.R., saw her body from up near the lights. She turned up, saw her mother and her father and was surrounded by the most incredible feeling of love that was so forgiving. That’s when she realized an important thing. "I saw my life," she said, "and I realized that I had been very loving to everyone in it, but I had never loved me. I saw how that had impoverished me to the point where I tried to kill myself."

I think too often we as women get so busy taking care of everybody else that we forget to care for ourselves. And it is extraordinarily important to do that.

Then she said, "I was given the privilege of coming back" and she put her arms on the table and leaned towards me saying, "Doctor, don’t you ever forget this. Life is a phenomenal gift. Use it well."

I wrote everything down she said, and I’ve thought about those words many times.

Forever Ours is published by New World Library, $20. You can read more about it at www.foreverours.com.