All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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

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.

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

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.’