All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

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.

one of the empty classrooms where an antique wired skeleton – once belonging (externally, not internally)

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.

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. Bodies were stolen from the churchyard where her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was buried, where the story goes that her father had taught her to write her name by tracing over the carved letters on her mother’s headstone. Ultimately, it fed into her work: none of the bodies that became the monster in Frankenstein had signed a contract to be there – he is nameless, a product, a belonging – while the real monster was the scientist, who was so gripped by the idea of his own creation that he disregarded what was right.

Genius or villain, the mind as matter looks much the same.

‘Because I work here, people ask me if I believe in ghosts,’ says Dave. ‘I categorically do not believe in ghosts, but you do see ghosts every day in this place. It’s the people who are visiting, day after day, and they’re alive and kicking but they’re so bereaved that all they’ve got left is coming here and going to the gravestone and standing there.’

From Terry swapping the faces back in the Mayo Clinic, to the funeral director sneaking in exiled boyfriends after hours to say goodbye during the AIDS crisis in small-town America, to the gravedigger and his feather-light molehills. There is tender care here, if you look for it. So many of these jobs, like Tony and Dave’s, aren’t limited to the text in the advert.

We’ve always had death. We’ve just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won’t happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere – to everyone. 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.