Cuyahoga County’s Office of the Medical Examiner has one of the oldest forensic pathology training programs in the country, and several times a year it hosts death-investigation trainings for law enforcement officers, prosecutors and first responders. A few days before taking the training myself, I met Christopher Harris, the office’s communications specialist, outside a warehouse of mock death scenes. A dummy dressed in a hoodie was sprawled under a picnic table on AstroTurf covered in blood, with a pistol near his rubber hand; another dummy in a house dress lay on the floor of a fake kitchen with the oven door open. These sets were built for the final test, in which students assess each scene and make an initial determination.

“You’ll do this on Tuesday, after you take the trainings,” Harris said, guiding me through each room. The idea is that death can fool you if you don’t know what you’re looking at, and despite the garishness of the stiff-limbed dummies, the improbable redness of their blood, the point is made. I mistook a particularly gruesome-looking accident for a homicide and an overdose for a natural death.

On the morning of the first day of the death-investigation training, we received a quiz. The questions ran in this general direction:

Fill in the blank: “A torn gunshot wound that can be put together again is ______________.”

True or false: While processing a hanging scene, the ligature should always be removed from the decedent on scene.

One by one, the pathologists took the lectern. Mooney taught us how to quickly distinguish between a stab wound from a blunt weapon and one from a sharp tip. Another doctor covered drownings; a third, hangings. We learned to recognize the way bullets will stipple the skin while entering the body versus exiting and how the body looks after poisonings, deaths in custody, bludgeonings, car accidents, hypothermia, hyperthermia, fire. We learned to recognize the common forward-slumping position of people who die from opioid overdoses, which is sometimes referred to as prayer position. We learned to look at a corpse and its damage or rot as a story — the last story a person will ever tell, and one he or she needs help communicating.

This work is unpleasant to think about for most people. But Americans’ unwillingness to devote time and money to studying the dead — our supposition that the story, or the parts of it that matter, stop with the heartbeat — absolutely fails to imagine the intimacy with which the living and the dead remain connected. The dead tell us how we’re dying, how we’re living, who among us gets a better shot at a whole and healthy life and the ways in which we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world. Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the progress we have yet to make, the wrongs we have yet to correct — all these are mirrored back to us by the dead.

In late 2019, news outlets began reporting on a study commissioned by the Congressional Black Caucus showing that the rate of suicide among black American teenagers was soaring. More than a year had passed since Gilson and I stood near the body of the 13-year-old in his morgue, so I called him to ask how he felt about his warning finally reaching the public consciousness.

He reiterated what he said then: that public-health studies tend to work with data gathered by offices like his a year or more earlier. He wondered whether the government had “missed a time to intervene much sooner.”