I do not tell any of them this detail. But when I am alone again, I consult my diaries from the time and re-read my musings on how something so inanimate had once been so animated in life. What is it that causes it to live and where does that ‘life’ go upon death? Is that the soul? Why didn’t God explain it clearly? In the Bible there are few mentions of anatomy and how we work. Man is discovering it for himself. Is God willing in this? Is this God’s work, to discover for ourselves what makes us, or is He angry that we dare to question, interfere, play with bodies in the name of science? Was I interfering with someone’s soul? Could they rest peacefully with their head separate from their body? Did my actions hurt them in Heaven?

At least she will not be itching from the lice anymore. For it was a female head.

My mind wanders. How do we have such different forms, men and women? Surely it would have been easier for us to be the same and to be able to procreate alone. To leave it to a form that must choose another, different to itself… is that to ensure there are two guardians of a baby? Though that is not always the case. Or should babies be placed in the care of a community and the responsibility shared, with generations of a family all involved? I suppose that is the ideal. How are some babies left alone with not even one person to care for them? How are others born into wealth and ignored by their parents and family?

I shall never have any babies myself. Though it saddens me to be the end of this branch of the Lister line, I do not feel an urge for it. They are sweet enough; I shall visit Vere, my delightful friend and her new baby soon and quite look forward to it. I marvel at how so small and pathetic a creature can grow so large and become a person, with memories and ambitions and intelligence and the capacity to love, yet also the capacity to hate. To ruin lives of those around them, or to improve them.

The similarities are more than the differences between male and female bodies. We have slightly different shapes, better suited for childbearing or for combat, but our feelings, our experiences of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch are the same. Our emotional capacities are the same. I believe our abilities to learn are the same. Do I wish myself male? I am not sure. I like my body and the pleasures it gives me. It feels manageable and my own. How would I ever know any different? Would life have been easier for my mind, as it is, to be in a male body? Yes. But would it have felt like ‘me’? I am not sure.