All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

By living in this manufactured state of denial, in the borderlands between innocence and ignorance, are we nurturing a fear that reality doesn’t warrant? Is there an antidote to the fear of death in knowing exactly what happens? In seeing exactly what happens?

I’ve finally seen what real death is like, and the transformative power of seeing is almost beyond words. But I found something else there too, in the dark. Just like with dive watches and childhood bedroom ceilings stickered with stars, you have to turn the light off to see the glow.

Poppy Mardall, a funeral director in her mid-thirties, stood up and told us that the first dead body you see should not be someone you love.

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

hope. He found the life in the smell of death, the hope in birds ordinarily cast as omens of doom; he found that something so fundamental in our fear – death and decay – could be quietly repurposed to save our lives.

He is not the first person I’ve met in the death industry to make me believe you require a natural level of cheer high enough that the dip, when it comes, doesn’t scrape the bottom of your heart.

Seeing the body is a signpost, a mark on the trail of grief. The consoling tell the grieving that a person isn’t really dead as long as you keep them alive in your mind, and this is true in more ways than the consoling person might intend.

You cannot give the families everything they want, but in recovering a body you can give them what they need to recover themselves.

‘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.’

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

They needed some hope of an intervention, a last-minute reprieve, some force that might make the phone on the wall of the death chamber ring – another irony, looking for clemency from the same guy who permitted his only son to be killed by way of state execution.

Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.’

This is a man who helped bereaved parents dress their dead children, who remembers now, in the cafe, the small, missable detail that when parents of autopsied babies saw the incision on the tiny body, they always referred to it as a ‘scar’ – implying healing; it was heartbreak in syntax.

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.’

But historical black holes make unsatisfactory graves to bury anything. How do you move on to grieving if, without the finality of seeing, you’re still trapped in disbelief?

We are squeamish, as a society, about dead bodies; we’re conditioned to be apart from them. We construct them in our imaginations, stacking them up to all the heights of horror our minds are capable of.

Being buried is an act of blind faith. You have no idea. You are just being left there, in a box, with no minders. But here there is someone keeping an eye on you as they pass, topping up the sunken bits, wondering where your headstone is.

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.

In the brief time I’ve been around death I think I’ve become more tender, yet also more toughened: accepting how all of this ends, I find myself mourning people while they’re still here.