Next to the Body, next to myself

Could this kill someone?

We all were kids once, and we all faced the same question: What do you want to be when you grow up? My answer was always simple—I wanted to be a doctor. 

I didn't really know what that meant, but it sounded respectful. Whenever I said doctor, a medical doctor, people reacted as if I had spoken a magic word, and I liked that reaction. Only later, during medical school,  I started to truly understand what being a doctor means, with all the weight and responsibility it carries.

Can you guess what was my second choice ? 

My second choice was to be a spy, which sounds funny now.

I remember being less tha 10  years old, walking in the yard with my grandmother and asking her endless questions. 

One day I picked up a piece of plastic and asked her, Could this kill someone? 

She replied, Yes, it could, you could choke on it, throw it away. A little later I grabbed some grass and asked the same thing. She laughed and said, 

No, it's just grass, it wouldn't kill you. I told her she was wrong this time. She looked at me with curiosity and asked why, and I replied, 

It could kill if it was poisoned. She just smiled somehow proud I would say.

 I was curious about death in ways most kids aren't. I was curious about death in ways most kids aren't. But not in the sense of wanting to feel it myself or experiment with it. I simply lived with that curiosity.

In my teenage years, I often sat next to my grandmother, and we would talk about things like sleep paralysis and extrasensory experiences. Together we once read a book about out-of-body experiences. Of course, at that young age, I didn't fully understand it, but I was fascinated by the idea of worlds beyond us—whether beneath or above.

Looking back now, I realize I am writing about this as if it were a bridge. On one side, there is forensic medicine, the science that tries to understand death. On the other side, there is the spiritual dimension, the question of what happens after death.

Many would say that science is science, while spirituality and energy belong to something else entirely. Yet, to give you perspective, I have spoken with highly experienced forensic doctors, university professors with many degrees, and even they admitted: of course, there is something after this.

What exactly? That, I will tell you in another chapter.

For many years of my childhood I believed death was a disease. I thought that way because, luckily, I hadn't been to many funerals. In my family, death didn't come until I was already in my twenties. To me, death seemed less like a tragedy and more like an unknown. It was scary, yes, but mostly because it was mysterious.

I also remember walking into my parents' bedroom one day while my mom was watching TV. On the screen, I saw a woman studying bones. I was fascinated. I asked what the show was about, and my mom explained it was Bones- the FBI agent and the anthropologist- I immediately said,

  I want to be a forensic doctor. 

My mom laughed, because of course I had no idea what that really meant.

Over time, I put that thought aside. In my last year of high school, law school became another option. My mom had studied law and it s working in this field and  she didn't encourage me to follow. I still wnated it. While I was preparing for the medical exam, I secretly also took practice tests for law school. I even applied. After I got into medical school, I admitted to my mom what I had done. She simply told me, You have to choose between the two. And I chose medicine.

Here I will stop for now, because I want to continue with the story of my first experience next to  a dead body during my first year of university, and how my understanding of death has changed since then.

What I want to show in this chapter is that I've always carried a deep curiosity about death. What does it feel like? What can cause it? What forms can it take? I also see it from a spiritual perspective. I believe in destiny, and I like exploring theories about how much of life is truly under our control.

With this book, I want to express my thoughts freely, despite the unwritten rules in my country that keep forensic medicine hidden. We fear death. We fear talking about it. We fear speaking about the dangers around us: someone could kill, kidnap, stab, or rape. These aren't just issues here, they exist everywhere.

At the end of this chapter, I would like to say that I have felt a deep fascination with the mystery of life since a very young age, although I never felt the urge to test death myself. Unfortunately, there are many cases where people have tried to experience how death feels, not for science purposes but for other reasons. Secondly, I have always been intrigued by the idea of hidden knowledge, information locked away, waiting to be discovered. That is where I have always wanted to dig.

I hope you will enjoy these chapters as I take you along on my journey through the fields of forensic science, criminology, and law.