Yesterday my senior citizen art class met at the Mütter Museum, which in some ways is an appalling place, in a stately building, and presented attractively. There is a second floor (reached by a grand staircase) with many portraits of distinguished gentlemen, a book collection, and spectacular paneling, and at the side of the building is a walled herb garden with benches. The first floor has the kind of exhibits that tell you they have access to a big printer; the exhibits are arranged pleasingly but with very few actual objects on display.

What the museum is really about is in the back room (which holds a vast collection of human skulls and the saponified corpse of a woman) and in the basement space below, which is full of dark wooden cases, displaying all kinds of human remains, specimens, skeletons of people with peculiar afflictions, plaster casts of conjoined twins, and a whole double cabinet of objects removed from people’s throats.

My adult child disapproves of the place because it is a vile freak show, but then they wrote their literature dissertation on Victorian-era American medical writing about hermaphroditism, so they have a more critical (and informed) stance than I do. (Things I cannot talk to my adult child about: Police. The Mütter Museum. That’s about it.)

I plopped myself down on a bench and spent an hour so drawing a pair of skeletons standing in a huge wooden-framed glass case, using Procreate, on my iPad. One of the skeletons was of a man with gigantism and the other was much smaller and there for contrast. A woman from my class was sitting working next to me, and she remarked with frustration on how fast I was working, but that is always a problem for me. If I’m in a class with serious artists, they look down on me. If I’m in a class with amateurs, they are dismayed by me. As I’ve said before, I can’t really help it; I am trained in art, but not entirely an artist, and I do work fast. Always have.

I chatted about asthma with her. She says she has asthma, but takes a regular dose of a maintenance medication; her daughter has it much worse and had to go to the hospital all the time. I tried a maintenance dose of one asthma medication and it had the paradoxical effect that such medicines sometimes have, and instead of helping it made me viciously even more short of breath. I just try hard not to set off my breathing problems. I mask everywhere, I take a daily antihistamine, and I always carry my inhaler with me. Mostly that works to keep my breathing tolerable.

I don’t like being on any kind of medication, honestly. Too many people my age are on multiple ones. Before he was diagnosed with colon cancer, my husband took a statin and a proton pump inhibitor for heartburn, along with generic Viagra both for function and because he had an enlarged prostate.

When he was very sick and on many medications, he was constantly terribly worried I was going to forget to give him the Viagra generic, or something equally necessary, and I had to keep showing him the spreadsheet I had made for all his pills and reassure him that he was taking everything. He was maybe a hundred pounds at the end, but he was confused and preoccupied, and he did not trust me to get it right.

I sympathize. I wake up on the regular from a sound sleep, sure I have forgotten to take some important pill. As I said, my only regular pill is an antihistamine.

I digress; the point was, he was on pain pills, cancer drugs, and all kinds of other things, and still trying to make sure he took his regular prescriptions. And then he let the damn doctors put him through a colonoscopy and an upper endoscopy when he was near the end. I wasn’t going to argue with him, but damn. He had a mass in his colon that completely obstructed him, and they knew that. He was riddled with metastasized cancer and his liver was shutting down. There was no reason for them to go poking down his tubes under anesthesia. They knew his gastric system looked like one of these specimens in that basement gallery where I was sitting now. Maybe they were just curious?

These are the kinds of things I think about while I’m sketching a sprightly skeleton in a museum filled with monstrous specimens, all the while continuing to make wheezing noises and coughing into my mask. I’m on prednisone right now, which I don’t want to take, and an expectorant, and I’m trying to hydrate and use my inhaler, but there’s an end to this, I hope.

I was more pleased than usual with my sketch, so when I felt as if I was done, I uploaded it to the class Google Docs folder and left the place, ready to shake the dust of memento mori out of the folds of my clothes.

When I got outside, it was snowing even though the day before it had been 79 degrees Fahrenheit. I refused to take that as an omen.