All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

by Sue Black

So, during the course of my life, I have gained the prospect of an additional eleven years. Isn’t that great? Not really. You see, I didn’t get those extra years when I was twenty, or even forty. If I am given them, it will be when I am seventy-four. Would that we could be granted more time in our prime, where youth continues to be wasted on the young.

It is an incredibly intimate and personal transition – the end of everything we know, are and understand, and no textbook or documentary can prepare us. If we cannot influence it, perhaps we shouldn’t waste precious time worrying about it. When it comes, we just need to experience it.

These ceremonies are very important, not only in enabling families and communities to commemorate the lives of the deceased and bid them a public farewell, but also in bringing some solace to the bereaved by giving them a framework within which to ritualise their grief, whether that involves expressing it or masking it.

In his poem ‘So Many Lengths of Time’, Brian Patten suggests that ‘a man lives for as long as we carry him inside us’, and that certainly strikes a chord with me. So often, as I grow older, I open my mouth and my father’s sayings fall out. We cannot die as long as there are people on earth who remember us.

I was just talking to someone about this idea--that we die twice, the second being when the last person who knew us dies. I've been thinking about this for a while.