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

Throughout my single digits, my dad – Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist – was working on a graphic novel called From Hell, written by Alan Moore.

Wow! How cool.

To me, there was more truth in the photographs of the Ripper victims; no one told me they were coming back, but school said Jesus did, and would again. I was being handed a ready-made conceptual framework to replace the one I had begun to build for myself, that I had pieced together from experience.

The psychological impact of losing someone you love and confronting the physical reality of death at the same time, and the tangled mindfuck that might be, was not something I thought I could swerve.

She is, as always, ready for someone to change her mind.

Here they become people again, not a patient or a victim or a fighter in a battle against their own body. Here they are finished, just waiting to be washed and dressed, then buried or burned.

You can look into the eyes of the dead and find nothing, not even a familiar shape.

I didn’t know that death, something so emotionally black, could be so bright: the sight of microbial life taking over a human one is almost luminous.

As we move him, rolling one way and then the other to pull the jeans up, trapped air escapes from Adam’s lungs with a sigh. There’s a smell of slightly-off chicken, raw, still cold.

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 only know one haircut,’ says Terry Regnier, whose own hair is neat and grey, combed back like Elvis, with matching sideburns and a moustache I would file under both ‘trucker’ and ‘porno’.

the room smells like steel and formalin, that same chemical odour from the high-school biology lab, the one that engulfed you if you ever took the lid off a jarred toad.

The leak carries on the longer the body stays in the programme; most of the embalming fluid is water, and the human body is not watertight. I ask Terry if this is a messy job and he gives me a look that says, You have no idea.

he got burned out on the night calls in particular – death has no consideration for the living’s business hours

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.

Read the history of anatomy and scientific enlightenment and the names of doctors are lit up like saints and gods. But the history of medicine is built on a bed of corpses – most with no names recorded at all.

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

By the time Mary Shelley was born in 1797, bodysnatching was rife, and it was no secret, either; when she was a young adult, various contraptions, like iron cages to hold coffins, were being sold specifically to thwart the resurrectionists.

Today’s UK medical cadavers are now exclusively the bodies of those who have donated them, which isn’t true of everywhere in the world: most countries in Africa and Asia study unclaimed bodies, while Europe, South America and North America are a mix of unclaimed and donated.

I felt almost nothing, or at least none of what I had expected. There was no shock, fear or repulsion in the freezer of decapitated heads: it was pure science and Futurama.

He doesn’t know what it is about him that allows him to do this job that others can’t, what it is that precludes him from nausea and nightmares and fainting.

Old death masks, like the Duke of Wellington’s, let nature stand as it is. Lacking teeth, it looks like his lips are being pulled down his throat by an invisible hand. But he died in 1852, when real death was what was expected – not the image the modern-day embalmer, or Nick, would perfect.

I remember the Shirley Jackson line at the beginning of The Haunting of Hill House, that ‘no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality’. I wonder how much reality, and for how long, it would take to crush someone.

it’s a common occurrence for close relatives to have doubts about, deny or mistakenly agree to the identity of a deceased person – even in freshly dead bodies. The effects of gravity on the features, the flattening of parts of the body that had contact with hard surfaces, swelling and pallor all work to distort the person as you might have known them.

‘I’m pretty sure that under my superficial surface, all you’ll find is more superficiality,’ he keeps joking, drinking tea out of a mug that says ‘PERFECT DAUGHTER’.

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.’

I tell him that over the past months, I’ve been given many reasons from people who think they have no reasons, but they all boil down to this: they are trying to help, and they are trying to do what they believe is right.

After a violent death, there is no US government agency that comes to clean up the blood, sparing property owners or family the sight of gore. When the body is in the van, the statements have been recorded, the fingerprints lifted and the police tape taken down, you are left with the mess and the quiet.

‘The gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look,’ wrote Susan Sontag in her last published book before her death, Regarding the Pain of Others, an analysis of our response to images of horror.

exploded brain dries like marble. It is still the hardest thing to clean.

The majority of jobs Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. take on – divvied up among the eight full-time staff, all men – are hoarding, rat infestations or blood-related.

‘A bloody stain on the carpet is four times that size underneath the carpet. It’s like an upside-down mushroom:

Andy Warhol was brought up a Catholic and was obsessed with images of death. How could he not be – it’s a religion built on them.

‘The more you look at the same exact thing,’ said Warhol, ‘the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.’

‘Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death,’ wrote Sontag.

like the ones in 1888 of the five dead women that I knew so well: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Kelly.

In 1945, Margaret Bourke-White – the first American female war photojournalist and the first woman allowed to work in combat zones – travelled through a collapsing Germany with General Patton’s Third Army.

As a viewer of images of death, the crucial element is context: we need to know what happened or they float loose in our memories as unmoored horror, the effects of which might be accumulative fear or numbness, depending on who you are.

Towards the end of her analysis of the effect horrific images have on us, Sontag wrote that ‘compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers … One starts to get bored,’ she says, ‘cynical, apathetic.’

Having travelled so far in a car with one working windscreen wiper and a bumper we reattached with a zip tie, I’m sort of resigned to whatever absurdity awaits us. I have no idea what to expect from someone who served as the state’s executioner for seventeen years.

Jerry pushes open the double doors to the high-school gym and the light is dazzling. It smells of fresh varnish and sweat, and the squeaks of shoes on the slick floor deafen.

Great prose here. I can hear and smell this scene.

Put enough robotics between you and the act and you can fool yourself into believing it barely happened, like drone strikes.

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.

It seems that everyone on death row, from the prisoners to the wardens, to the politicians and judges who refused the pardons, shifted the weight of responsibility onto God.

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.’

Death is not a moment but a process. Something fails in the body and the system shuts down as the news spreads – as air is cut off, as blood stops flowing. Decay, likewise, does not happen all at once. No two bodies decompose at exactly the same rate

embalming fluid, that alien yet familiar smell, the combination of high-school biology labs and a sharp tang of nail varnish that will get stronger as the procedure progresses. When I get home later, I’ll notice my jeans stink of it with a strength that invades the whole room.

To get deliberately pregnant feels like the most hopeful, reckless thing you can do to your heart. Parenthood, from what I can see, must be a mess of love and terror. The thought of it makes me woozy.

In a 2013 New Yorker piece, Ariel Levy talks about the miscarriage she had at five months on the bathroom floor in a hotel in Mongolia.

It’s early spring. The trees still mostly bare, the clouds heavy and dark. Small clumps of yellow primrose flowers pop up between the unruly graves.