All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

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

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

Terry takes me into one of the empty classrooms where an antique wired skeleton – once belonging (externally, not internally) to prominent endocrinologist and Mayo co-founder, Dr Henry Plummer – dangles from a hook by the whiteboard.

(the injectable preservative fluid ‘formalin’ is formaldehyde gas saturated with methyl alcohol so it becomes liquid, but evaporation turns it gaseous again)

On his wall behind him is a framed 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.’

He’s peeled the shirt off a man who knew a flight was going down but had the foresight and the steady hand to write a letter to his wife on the fabric, knowing that a piece of paper would disintegrate or be lost, but a shirt had a chance of being recovered with him.

Months prior to this I sat at a picnic table in winter as Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, explained consciousness to me. 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.