Devorah Gellner couldn’t move a muscle in her body. The faintest twitch was impossible, the young sixteen year old girl might as well be dead – and this is exactly what everyone believed.

She was alive and conscious when her mother came in to lecture her for sleeping in and missing school, but the young girl didn’t respond. She was alive as her mother called for an ambulance after not feeling a pulse in her daughter’s still body. And she was alive when she was declared dead at 12:34pm.

She wanted to scream, shout and cry, do anything to let somebody know that she was still alive – watching everything that was happening. But there was nothing she could do. She tried to move her arms and her legs, make any movement to break free of this paralysis, but all she felt was resistance forcing her into stillness.

She was forced to watch as her parents grieved the loss of their child as she was placed onto a stretcher. She watched as her father closed her eyes and Devi helplessly felt herself be taken away from her home, her family, the life she once knew. She felt the wheels of the stretcher roll as she was brought into the morgue of the hospital. She heard the footsteps of the pathologists as they entered the room – it was time for her autopsy.

The first cut hurt the most. As the scalpel sliced open her chest, she felt every millimeter of the incision, every crawling movement it made as it cut across her front, down to her abdomen, creating a large Y-shaped cut on her body. She wanted to scream in agony, cry in pain, thrash in frustration, but nothing could be done as the pathologists placed the clamps into her flesh and opened her up, poking around her organs as if she were some thing.

She felt the pathologists crack her ribs, an unbearable, unspeakable pain, and remove them from her body. She felt her organs be removed one by one, being ripped from her body. She felt as her trachea was removed, followed by her thyroid glands, esophagus, and her still, non-beating heart. Yet she still wasn’t dead. She could feel everything. Was this what the afterlife was like? Is death simply a case of helpless paralysis as your soul carries on, trapped inside its earthly shell? Is this all that life is leading up to?

The autopsy continued, removing the rest of her organs as the pathologists examined the organs in amazement, astounded at what possibly could have killed the young hollow shell of a girl on the table. They said to each other, “This is a marvel, I’ve never seen a case like this before!” A medical case to be examined, that is all her life had been reduced to now, and she was forced to experience it all.

They concluded that whatever caused her death must have come from the brain. She listened as the pathologist called for the scalpel, and heard his soft footsteps as he made his way to her head. She felt the scalpel brush against the back of her skull and the first puncture of the blade into her cranium. The intolerable pain rattled her consciousness as the incision arced her skull, a cut from the back of one ear to the other. But this pain was incomparable to the state of fear she was in as she heard the chilling sound of the vibrating saw, and felt swiftly moving blades cut into her forehead, relieving her of the top of her skull.

She wanted to scream, she wanted to shout, she wanted to do anything but there was no hope as the pathologist began to remove her brain, releasing her soul from the cruel world.