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

by Sue Black

‘Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live’

Forensic pathology seeks evidence of a cause and manner of death – the end of the journey – whereas forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led, the journey itself, across the full span of its duration.

Should we ever actually conquer death, the human race and the planet would be in real trouble.

‘Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’

I realised that day that when the animation of the person we were is stripped out of the vessel we have used to pilot our way through life, it leaves little more than an echo or a shadow in the physical world.

As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: ‘Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.’

‘Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory’

Brian Patten suggests that ‘a man lives for as long as we carry him inside us’,

Anyone who thinks forensic anthropology is sexy should spend a day in Old Monkland Cemetery in January, chilled to the bone, up to their knees in mud and clay with the excavation walls continually in danger of collapsing around them and creating their own tomb.

Having chinks in your armour isn’t always a sign of weakness. It is often a sign of humanity.