‘My pager went off very early one morning. I was on call, so I rang in to the communications centre – they needed to send out a pathologist. Shortly beforehand the police had been notified of a body discovered down by a dike, probably a road accident. I was to help the police with their examination of the scene. I drove down in my car to an address in the polder, a large expanse of land reclaimed from the sea. The morning roads were still empty.
Polderlands are vast and flat, and the roads are elevated above dikes that slope downwards to the fields. I spotted the police car from some distance away. Parked next to it was the traffic accident examination van, while at the base of the dike lay the unlucky motorcyclist. The shattered fragments of his helmet were scattered some distance away. He must have lain there all night, invisible to the cars driving past. He’d only been spotted that morning by chance, by a farmer perched high up in his tractor who happened to glance down to the right.
I examined the body for rigor mortis, to determine when death had set in. I checked for lividity, or bruise-like pools of blood in the parts of the body lying closest to the ground. I looked at his position and surroundings – the only sand on his body was under his fingers, so nobody had moved him around. He had died sometime during the previous evening or night, I concluded, after falling off his bike and smashing to the ground below with incredible force.
The police officers clambered back up to the van to get a blanket to cover him up with. We called a mortician. I stayed down below, along with the body and my colleague from the traffic accident department.
Just at that moment, the sun came up. We were standing at the edge of a field of wheat: a light mist hung in the air, the birds started chirping and the sideways light lent the landscape an almost dreamlike quality. My colleague saw the look on my face. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” he said. We were surrounded by the beauty of nature, a vision of glory and serenity, while beside us a young man lay dead. I thought of his family, perhaps a wife and children, who in all likelihood were anxious because he hadn’t returned home that night. I knew that the police were on their way to bring the news of his death. I knew he would have died instantly, and although I really should always remain objective, I do remember finding it a comforting thought. I’ve examined plenty of bodies, and usually their deaths seem quite distant to me. I’ve learned to keep my barriers up and avoid getting too emotional about what I see. But on that sunlit morning, something was different. The magnificence of the surroundings transported me away from the situation, while at the same time drawing me further into it. I was suddenly struck by how utterly unpredictable life is, by the realisation that it is completely up to chance whether we live to see another day. This is how things can go, I thought: it was pleasant weather, this man went out for a ride on his bike … and just never came back. And he died somewhere out of sight, with the traffic passing by, invisible to the world. It hit me hard, and I found it somehow symbolic of the indifference of the universe. A man dies, but the world keeps turning, and the sun rises once again.
Despite the tragedy, I didn’t find it a troubling thought. On the contrary, the sun emerging above the fields imparted a sense of consolation: death is such a central part of our existence, it can exist in the very midst of life.’