All That Remains: A Life in Death

by Sue Black

We shy away from death. We ignore it and avoid speaking of it, as if talking about it will somehow encourage it. We tend to personify death as the grim reaper, a sinister, hooded harbinger of pain. But death can be peaceful and merciful too. And, like it or not, death is inevitable; we would do well to try to understand it better.

Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel. While there is much about death that must remain unknown to us, as an expert witness from the final frontier Sue Black is the wisest, most reassuring, most compelling of guides.

‘Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live’ Norman Cousins political journalist (1915–1990)

As Fiona, our inspirational chaplain at Dundee University, puts it so eloquently, there is no comfort to be had from soft words spoken at a safe distance.

‘Mortui vivos docent’ (The dead teach the living) Origin unknown

‘Without systematic attention to death, life sciences would not be complete’ Elie Metchnikoff microbiologist (1845–1916)

WHAT MAKES US human? One of my favourite definitions is: ‘Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’

The ‘conscious’ aspect of being human is perhaps our most defining characteristic.

The four permanent cell types are the neurons in our nervous system, a tiny little area of bone at the base of our skull called the otic capsule, the enamel in our teeth and the lenses in our eyes.

The nutrient building blocks required to construct our otic capsule were supplied by Mum from what she was eating around sixteen weeks into her pregnancy. So within our head, in that minute piece of bone just big enough to hold four raindrops, we will perhaps carry for the rest of our lives the elemental signature of what our mother had for lunch when she was four months pregnant. Proof, if any were needed, that our mums never leave us, and a whole new perspective on the mystery of how they manage to get inside our heads.

So we could, in theory, look at the remains of an individual and, from the isotopic signatures in the otic capsule and first molar, discover where in the world their mother was living when she was pregnant with them and the nature of her diet. We could then analyse the remainder of the adult teeth to establish where the deceased person had grown up, and then the rest of their bones to determine where they had lived for the past fifteen years or so. Finally, we could use their hair and nails to locate where they spent the last years or months of their life.

I am often asked why we don’t have a ‘body farm’ in the UK. I think the more relevant question is why would we need, or want, one?

‘If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death’ Samuel Butler writer (1835–1902)

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.

The dead are not as they are depicted in the movies by actors lying perfectly still as if in a deep sleep. There is a void in them which serves somehow to weaken the certainty of the bonds of recognition. Of course the explanation for that is simple – we have never seen them dead before. Dead really is dead, it is not just sleeping or lying motionless.

Fear of death is often a justifiable fear of the unknown; of circumstances beyond our personal control which we cannot know and for which we cannot prepare. ‘Pompa mortis magis terret, quam mors ipsa,’ the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote over 400 years ago, quoting the Roman Stoic Seneca. ‘It is the accompaniments of death that are frightful rather than death itself.’ Yet the control that we like to think we have over our lives is often an illusion. Our greatest conflicts and barriers exist in our minds and in the way we deal with our fears. It is pointless even to try to control that which cannot be controlled. What we can manage is how we approach and respond to our uncertainties.

Stimulation of the temporo-parietal junction on the right side of the brain will generate a sense of floating and out-of-body levitation.

Vivid imagery, false memories and the replaying of real scenes from the past can be induced by fluctuating levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which interacts with the hypothalamus, amygdala and hippocampus.

Depletion of oxygen and increased levels of carbon dioxide can cause the visual hallucination of bright light and tunnel vision, as we...

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’ Theodor Seuss Geisel writer, cartoonist and animator (1904–91)

Death is, after all, a normal part of life and sometimes in Western cultures we hide it away when maybe what we need to do is to embrace it and celebrate it.

‘The measure of life is not its duration, but its donation’ Peter Marshall pastor (1902–49)

The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn’t something we ‘get over’, and it doesn’t necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

All we can hope for is that the periods of paralysing, overwhelming grief become less frequent. But living with loss is personal to all of us and has no predetermined path or timeline.

Where in the past we might have accepted a terminal prognosis and turned to a church to ensure the health of our souls, now we are more likely to trawl the internet in search of every last vestige of temporal hope that might keep us alive for just a little bit longer.

‘There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless’ Wilson Mizner playwright, entrepreneur and raconteur (1876–1933)

AT WHAT POINT does your death cease to matter personally to someone somewhere? 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.

Would I feel a sense of violation if someone chose to dig up my grandmother or great-grandmother to study them as archaeological specimens? You bet I would.

‘De mortuis nil nisi bene dicendum’ Of the dead, speak only good Chilon of Sparta Greek sage (600BC)

‘Time can never heal the pain, and I can’t believe that time will ease the conscience so much that someone out there can believe they will get away with murder. It always gives me some hope when I read of an old crime being solved. Maybe one day.’

The not knowing is one of the most debilitating burdens for those grieving for the missing. If the work we do brings them some little comfort and relief, then it has great value. And if, by chance, the perpetrators of crimes that become cold cases such as these are still alive, they can be brought to justice. There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder.

‘True identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual’ Stephen Covey educator (1932–2012)

We can predict the adult height of a child either by doubling their stature at the age of two (isn’t it incredible that we grow to half our full adult height within our first two years?) or by calculating what is called MPH (mid-parental height). For a boy, in centimetres, the equation is: father’s height + mother’s height + 13 ÷ 2; for a girl: father’s height – 13 + mother’s height ÷ 2.

‘Let fire and cross, flocks o’ beasts, broken bones and dismemberment come upon me’ Ignatius of Antioch bishop and martyr (circa 35–107)

If murder is regarded as perhaps the most heinous of all crimes, the deliberate desecration of remains is seen as an additional insult, a step beyond the boundaries of humanity.

In our world, we strive to maintain a clinical detachment while engaged in our work and are largely removed from the immediacy of the grief and distress of family and friends.

‘More inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s causes’ Baron Samuel von Pufendorf political philosopher (1632–94)

OUR WORLD SEEMS to grow smaller with every day that passes. Our constant craving for instant information on events taking place around the world has been fuelled by the rapidly advancing technology that can supply it. The days when our news was delivered by the papers every morning, and in bulletins on the radio or television broadcast at scheduled times, are long gone and what was once global now feels almost local.

‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals’ Attributed to William E. Gladstone prime minister of the UK (1809–98)

‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark’ Francis Bacon philosopher and scientist (1561–1626)

sometimes there is a reason why we find ourselves in a certain place at a certain time and often it has nothing to do with our own plans, choices or desires. We are there because fate has put us there, quite possibly to help someone else.

None of us is without fear – it is, after all, one of our oldest and strongest emotions – and we are all afraid of something.

In ‘The Poisoned Pen’ (1911), Kennedy confronts the criminal with the words: ‘You perhaps are not acquainted with the fact, but the markings of the veins in the back of the hand are peculiar to each individual – as infallible, indestructible, and ineffaceable as finger prints or the shape of the ear.’

‘I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature’ William Harvey physician, De Motu Cordis (1628)

‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

How much more wonderful would our lives be, whether long or short, if we measured them in joy, laughter and utter nonsense?

If all there is beyond death is darkness, I won’t be able to remember it anyway, which is a great shame. But perhaps this is all there is to it: a fugacious moment tacked on to the end of a long story like a final full stop.