All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

I like this about old Victorian graveyards: they are not the obsessively tidy visions of Los Angeles cemetery parks, with lawns mowed to golfing-green perfection and marble headstones shining and white. Those are a display of constant battle against the encroachment of nature, while cemeteries like this are places of death overtaken by the relentless force of life, and moss. Graves are engulfed by vines and leaves as if in an embrace of ownership. Death is part of life, they say. Death is part of all of it.

Some of the world’s most famous architecture, our most beloved wonders, are graves. The pyramids of Egypt. India’s Taj Mahal. Monuments built to house the dead. There are few things that I can think of where the difference between basic and luxury is so great than in what you do with a dead body. What could be more basic than a hole in the ground? More grand than the Taj Mahal?

A black beetle scuttles past on the floor, its long articulated body raised in a curl behind it like a scorpion. I point at it. ‘That’s called a Devil’s Coachman!’ Tony shouts above the noise, grinning because he knows I won’t believe him. I google it later and it’s true.

Not everything burns. Some bodily implants are removed before the body is laid in its coffin, lest they explode:

Other non-biological pieces – like the mercury in teeth – melt and escape into the atmosphere, or, in the case of breast implants that funeral directors sometimes forget to take out, stick like chewing gum to the bottom of the cremator.

Cancer is the last thing to burn. Tony doesn’t quite understand why it happens; he thinks maybe it’s the lack of fat cells, maybe the density of the mass – but when the rest of the body is gone, a tumour can sometimes remain, sitting black and still among the bones.

Christopher Hitchens described the tumour in his oesophagus that would ultimately kill him as a ‘blind, emotionless alien’.

It’s January, it’s freezing, and the trees look like black bones against an overlit backdrop, a side-effect of the new LED streetlights distracting from the ruin around us by illuminating other things.

Detroit is – or was, depending on how optimistic you are about its future – a city of dead American dreams. At its peak in 1950, it was the fourth most populated city in the country,

‘I think it’s kind of funny that you’re hanging all your hope on technology reviving your corpse, but it’s not even letting us do a video call without failing,’ I say as I sit back, having given up on faffing around with settings.

Something she misses now about funereal embalming is making a person look normal for their family again – she misses plumping up the withered shell of cancer patients, returning the colour to pallid cheeks. Because ultimately, all of this, for Hillary, is about caring for people.

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.