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

by Sue Black

‘Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.’

It saddens me that when I die, so, at last, will my grandmother. Yet I find it apt and comforting that we will die together, I in my body and she in my mind.

In traditional Japanese cremations, the family pick the bone fragments out of the ashes with chopsticks and transfer them into an urn, starting at the feet end and finishing at the head so that the deceased is never upside down.

I just love the fact that humans cannot fail to be affected by the stories of other humans, even those who lived centuries ago, and how they embrace these forerunners as part of their neighbourhood because they once occupied the same patch of earth on our planet.

The term ‘sex’ is used very specifically in our field and is not to be confused with ‘gender’: the former is used to denote the genetic construction of the individual while the latter relates to personal, social and cultural choices and may be at odds with our biological sex.

Sue says trans rights!!!

God bless the good old Scottish diet and the lack of fluoride in our water.

but occasionally I can’t help thinking wistfully of a formidable Highland matriarch who, in days gone by, was horrified to learn that improvements to the mail system would mean she would have her post delivered every weekday. ‘Is it not bad enough that I have to suffer bad news once a week?’ she lamented. ‘Now you want me to have it every day.’

I cannot state it often enough because it really is something that I believe in my very core: we must never forget that with disasters it is not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’.

Big agree here