Autopsy of a Dying Movement
Postmortems
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as Dr. Sarah Chen pulled open drawer 47B. The cold air escaped in a visible cloud, carrying with it the faint chemical smell of preservation. Behind her, three colleagues stood in a loose semicircle, their breath fogging in the chill of the morgue.
“It’s been four months,” said Marcus Webb, adjusting his glasses. “We should have done this in December.”
“We weren’t ready in December,” Chen replied. She gripped the drawer handle and pulled. The body slid out on its metal tray, covered by a sheet that had yellowed slightly at the edges. “None of us were.”
The four of them had worked together for years, first in the hospital, then on the campaign, then back to the hospital when the campaign ended. They had been many things to each other: colleagues, strategists, friends. Now they were coroners, gathered to determine what had killed the thing they had all believed in.
James Okonkwo pulled on his surgical gloves with practiced efficiency. “Let’s start with the brain.”
Chen made the incision. The skull cap came away cleanly, revealing gray matter that had begun to deteriorate long before death. She probed gently with her instruments, then stepped back.
“Significant cognitive decline,” she said. “Progressive. Probably began eighteen months before death, maybe longer.”
The silence that followed was uncomfortable. Finally, Lisa Park spoke from her position near the door. “We knew.”
“Lisa,” Marcus warned.
“We did. We all saw it. The word retrieval problems, the confusion during briefings, the way he would lose the thread of a sentence halfway through.” She crossed her arms. “We just didn’t say anything because we thought we were the only ones who noticed.”
“We thought we were protecting him,” James said quietly.
“We were protecting ourselves.” Chen set down her instruments. “We didn’t want to be the ones to say it out loud. So we all stayed quiet, and we all assumed everyone else was as blind as we were pretending to be.”
She moved down the body, making a Y-incision across the abdomen. The stomach, when she opened it, was distended with undigested material. She reached in with forceps and began extracting objects, laying them on a metal tray beside the body.
A small defund the police sign, still legible despite months of gastric acid. A pamphlet advocating for the abolition of ICE. A position paper on decriminalizing border crossings. A collection of tweets, somehow solidified into physical form, calling law enforcement officers fascists and oppressors.
“2020,” Marcus said, picking up the defund the police sign with gloved fingers. “We swallowed all of this in 2020.”
“The base was energized,” Lisa said. “We had to respond to the moment.”
“The moment passed. The indigestion didn’t.” Chen continued extracting objects. “None of this was ever processed. It just sat here, rotting, poisoning everything around it. Every time someone asked about crime, about the border, this is what they smelled.”
James held up a crumpled piece of paper that had once been a policy proposal. “We told ourselves the electorate would come around. That they would understand the nuance.”
“They understood,” Chen said. “They understood exactly what we were saying. We just didn’t like what they heard.”
She moved finally to the chest, cracking the ribs to expose the heart. It was enlarged, the muscle fibers stretched thin, the chambers distended beyond any sustainable capacity. The vessels leading into it had multiplied, dozens of arteries and veins branching off in every direction, each one pulling at the organ from a different angle.
“Heart failure,” she said. “But not from blockage. From overwork.”
She traced the vessels with her finger. Each one was labeled in tiny script: racial justice, LGBTQ rights, disability advocacy, climate activism, reproductive freedom, immigrant rights, labor unions, student debt relief, housing justice, police reform, Indigenous sovereignty. The labels went on and on, covering every inch of available tissue.
“Every constituency demanded more blood supply,” James said. “More attention, more resources, more priority.”
“They had legitimate grievances,” Lisa said. “Historical wrongs that deserved recognition.”
“I’m not saying they didn’t.” Chen stepped back from the body. “But the heart couldn’t say no. It couldn’t tell any of them that resources were finite, that attention was limited, that sometimes you have to prioritize. So it tried to give everyone everything, and it worked itself to death.”
Marcus removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “So what killed it? The brain, the stomach, or the heart?”
“All three,” Chen said. “A leader too diminished to course-correct. A body full of positions it couldn’t digest. And a heart that couldn’t set limits.” She began covering the body again, pulling the yellowed sheet up over the ruined chest. “That’s the report.”
The four of them stood in silence, the buzzing of the fluorescent lights filling the space between them. Finally, Lisa spoke.
“We can’t release this.”
“The party needs to know,” James said.
“The party knows. They just don’t want to hear it.” Lisa moved toward the drawer. “If we publish this, we’re attacking the coalition. We’re telling activists their causes were the problem. We’re admitting we knew about the cognitive decline and said nothing. We’re confessing that the positions we championed were electoral poison.”
“So what do you suggest?” Chen asked, though she already knew the answer.
Lisa’s hand rested on the drawer. “We put it back. We wait. Maybe in a few years, when emotions have cooled, when new leadership has emerged, we can revisit.”
One by one, the others nodded. Chen helped Lisa slide the body back into drawer 47B, the metal runners squealing in protest. The door closed with a solid thunk, and the lock engaged automatically.
They stripped off their gloves in silence and filed out of the morgue, leaving the autopsy results unwritten and the cause of death officially undetermined.