The Forensic Pathologist

It was a dark, cold, rainy night. I was working alone that night. I had just finished an autopsy and was finishing closing the Y incision when I received the call that I had two more patients on the way. I sighed. This was going to be a tough case. The officer told me that there was a family in a car crash. The wife was driving with the husband in the passenger seat and the newborn baby in the car seat in the back seat of the car. The wife had hit a tree and then the car burst into flames. The husband and daughter burned to death but the woman escaped with third degree burns. She was being air lifted to this hospital. However, I had to stay and preform the autopsies on the rest of her family. The doctors had put the woman in a medicine induced coma. The bodies arrived from the ambulance and were transferred to the slab that I worked on. The small burned body was so tiny. There was barely anything left. The man, if you could call him that, was burned beyond recognition. There was hardly anything left of him either. There was a stale, burnt pork smell. I started my job. I decided to start with the baby first. As it turned out, the baby died of smoke inhalation so she had a bit of a merciful death. The husband suffered more. He burned for a long time before he finally died. I recorded my findings in the official report and scrubbed up. I went downstairs to deliver the report to my supervisor. He looked miserable and then informed me that the wife was awake. He told me that I would have to be the one to explain about her family. She didn't know. My mouth dropped. How do you tell someone that their whole life had changed? She lost everything ... her husband and her newborn daughter, and I had to tell her. I walked into her hospital room with my file. I tried to smile and ask how she was doing. She wasn't interested in small talk, just how her family was. I told her as gently as I could that her family was dead. I told her that they didn't suffer and died quickly. I knew it was a lie but she deserved some kind of peace. She told me that a dog had run out in front of her car and she tried not to hit it. She lost her entire family while trying to avoid a dog. She started sobbing. All I could do was just go up to her and give her a hug. What else could I do?