All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade

by Hayley Campbell

On average, 6,324 people in the world die every hour – that’s 151,776 every day, about 55.4 million a year.

You need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief,

The fact that everyone we love will one day die often doesn’t dawn on us until something bad happens.

When did we forget that pain is a warning, a scream from the voiceless parts of our bodies saying it needs help, something is wrong, something requires our attention? I’ve got this great way of dealing with things that might be damaging me – I just switch off the notifications.

Ruth Richardson’s excellent book Death, Dissection and the Destitute.

Undying Faces by Ernst Benkard. Published (in English) in 1929, it’s a collection of death masks ranging from the fourteenth century up to the twentieth.

‘no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality’.

On his wall behind him is a framed quote from William Gladstone: ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.’

@crimescenecleanersinc on Instagram,

Regarding the Pain of Others, an analysis of our response to images of horror.

‘compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers … One starts to get bored,’ she says, ‘cynical, apathetic.’

Paul Friedland writes in his book Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France that this image we have of an executioner as an agent of the law, someone whose job it is to carry out a sentence handed down from above, is a relatively modern idea purposely put in place by Enlightenment reformers who were trying to construct a different kind of penal system – one that was rational and bureaucratic, one that dispersed responsibility, and therefore blame, among many cogs in a vast system. Prior to this, in France at least, the executioner was considered an extraordinary being, an outcast, a universally reviled person ‘whose touch was so profane that he could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them’.

the body tucks our trauma away in dark spaces, we build narratives with blank spots to save ourselves.

Jerry died of Covid-19 on 13 April 2020. Obituaries link his illness to an outbreak at Cedar Street Baptist Church in Richmond, where he sang in the choir. The death penalty in Virginia was abolished on 25 March 2021, less than a year after Jerry died.

Later, in 1963, Jessica Mitford published a book called The American Way of Death, which is a very funny but also radical look at the funeral industry, and a pretty ruthless exercise in muckraking.

Caitlin Doughty, in her book From Here to Eternity, wrote about death practices around the world, and there was one place in particular where embalming played a large role. In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, families periodically take the dead out of their tombs to wash and dress them, offer them presents, light their cigarettes. In the period between death and the funeral, a body can be kept at home – sometimes for years.

This is clearly not a glamorous job, though she discovered it on television: she wanted to be Dana Scully in The X-Files, specifically Scully in the episode ‘Bad Blood’ where she plays a forensic pathologist, autopsying victims of a drugged pizza murder. ‘It’s one of the funny ones,’ says Lara, who grew up watching late-night TV in the nineties just like I did, and abandoned the idea of becoming a forensic pathologist when she learned you had to become a doctor first. Then, even in full-time training, it takes five and a half years to qualify. She wanted to go straight to the mortuary and skip the living entirely.

He told me that reality is the brain’s best guess at what is happening outside of its own dark room, where it sits windowless and blind, being fed information by other tools – eyes, ears, fingers. All of your senses are spies for your brain. It pieces together what it can from the scant information it is supplied, blurs it with memory and experience and calls it life.

To me, the most affecting horror is not the blood-soaked madman with the chainsaw, but the quiet domestic scene gone wrong, the minor note on the piano keys: it’s the suicide in the family home, the bodies under the patio, the baby drowning in the bath.

endings are intrinsically woven into beginnings.

You can’t control life events – life isn’t in our control – but you can control how you look after a family when they are dealing with the most devastating moment in their lives.’

From Terry swapping the faces back in the Mayo Clinic, to the funeral director sneaking in exiled boyfriends after hours to say goodbye during the AIDS crisis in small-town America, to the gravedigger and his feather-light molehills. There is tender care here, if you look for it. So many of these jobs, like Tony and Dave’s, aren’t limited to the text in the advert.

a physics teacher called Robert Ettinger – then in his forties and increasingly aware of his own mortality, like anyone in their forties – wrote a book about how you could live forever. It was called The Prospect of Immortality and it made him, for a time, famous. He appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show alongside Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did.

There’s no greater privilege in life than being allowed to investigate the death of another human being.

In psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, about the clinical basis of trauma in the mind and body, he writes that the body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones, which are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease. ‘However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions.

We’ve always had death. We’ve just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won’t happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere – to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.