All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

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

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?

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.

Stand in a cemetery surrounded by thousands of bodies and you don’t think about the difference six feet of earth makes; here the visual crowd is what staggers.

Nick tells me that when you die, you look amazing. All tension is released from your face, lines disappear, years of worry and pain vanish in moments. You look serene. Your face takes on an even colour.

One of my kids said to me once that I’m running away from reality by having so much to do that I don’t really have any time to consider reality.’

As we sit on fold-out chairs, clutching paper bags with Kenyon-branded stationery, surrounded by model aeroplanes balanced on windowsills, we are told that people on the whole can accept a disaster. They can grieve their lost loved ones and can handle grim truth better than you think. But they cannot and will not accept an inadequate response from a company that had no plan for the living or the dead.

Personal effects are not just stuff; he tells us that within an item that somebody had with them at the time they met their end there is untold emotional weight, and it is not for us to judge how heavy.

But death is trans-formative, not just to the person and the family; it changes the objects in a house.

Images of death can be all around us, but we no longer process them as such because of their ubiquity. We are so accustomed to their presence, we become numb to them. You walk into a church and do not think anew that this is a tortured man, dead on a cross. The crucifixion is one of the most revisited moments in the history of art, but it is no longer shocking; it is a story you’ve heard again and again.

‘compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers

‘What I learned in the work I did was that people are much stronger and much more capable of doing things than we give them credit for.’

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.

Life is not supposed to surface in the mortuary.

she is fascinated by how much people can change, how much life is still going on after death

‘No one wants praise, no one does this for the glory of it, but you do kind of want some acknowledgement that what you do matters. It matters to the families.’

‘But you feel protective over the dead. Kind of like, I will take care of you because no one else will. How do you celebrate work that has essentially come from someone else’s pain?’

I’m not grieving – I don’t know what I’m doing. Am I traumatised? Probably, but not exactly. It seems bigger than my own internal reaction.

The bookends of life were considered to be the realm of women.

She could not breathe life into the baby, but she could look after the families. She couldn’t take the situation away, but she could shape it in a way that was less bad.

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.’

Where did these women put that unspeakable grief and how many were drowned by it?

‘The first dead body you see should not be someone you love.’

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.

I’ve made no assumptions with you, reader, about what you can handle – it would be antithetical to what I was trying to do, conceding to the cultural barriers I was trying to go beyond – and now you’re here with me.

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. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster – rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals – utilise their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised.’

‘everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.’

When Mattick talks about detachment, I believe it’s a constructive detachment rather than a cold one: putting the scene in context, allowing himself space in order to perform his job effectively without collapsing. He wants me not to bury the things I have seen, not to ignore them and block them out, but to put them in a context that is meaningful.

I think there is urgent, life-changing knowledge to be gained from becoming familiar with death, and from not letting your limits be guided by a fear of unknown things: the knowledge that you can stand to be near it, so that when the time comes you will not let someone you love die alone.

Where does empathy come from if not seeing and trying to understand?

death shows us what is buried in the living. By shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death we deny ourselves a deeper understanding of who we truly are.

‘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,’

Thinking about death and the passage of time is part of tending a garden. You put things in the ground knowing they might fail. You grow things knowing they will die with the frosts six months from now. An acceptance of an end and a celebration of a short, beautiful life is all tucked up in this one act.

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.