All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

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’ve got this great way of dealing with things that might be damaging me – I just switch off the notifications.

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.

‘Death is a part of living,’ he says. ‘That’s one of the things that we do.’

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.’

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.

‘Back in Ancient Egypt, working with the dead was a very, very special profession, whereas now you’re reviled. You don’t want to say “I love my job” because that makes it sound like you’re saying “I’m really happy that your loved one died!”’ The smile that is usually so warm is repurposed here as sarcastic and ghoulish. ‘But you feel protective over the dead. Kind of like, I will take care of you because no one else will. How do you celebrate work that has essentially come from someone else’s pain?’

Midwives exist at the centre of human power and fragility – they remain life and death workers, both.

‘There’s so much that’s misunderstood about pregnancy loss. The perception that you can just try again makes that little life seem not as important.’ I think about the twelve-week rule, how pregnant women are not supposed to say they are pregnant, for fear of jinxing it, for fear of having to say they are no longer pregnant – how that loss is experienced in isolation, expected to be endured in isolation, how for many there is no symbolism, no coffin, and how fewer than half of the women who experience a miscarriage ever find out why it happened. You were an ecosystem, a world with at least one inhabitant, and then you weren’t.

I tell him that some things get to me in a way that others don’t, but I stop short of telling him about the baby. I tell him that I think the difference is that I’m a visitor in this world and can leave at any time, so what sticks is not the sadness – which, as Dave said, can be cumulative – but the stories of people doing the good and right thing even though no one will notice. 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.

How can they believe in that when this is happening, and horrible bastards live to ninety? I’m not sure if there’s a God looking down, but he’s a funny geezer if there is.’

There’s no greater privilege in life than being allowed to investigate the death of another human being. That’s a huge statement. It’s massive. You are going to play a small part in doing that. Somebody is entrusting you to do that.’

Now I see all of it: death shows us what is buried in the living. By shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death we deny ourselves a deeper understanding of who we truly are.

Kenyon. We are cheating ourselves out of knowing this, with our system of payments and disappearances. These unseen acts of care, the tender mercies of these death workers, show not a cold detachment from their work, but the opposite – some kind of love.

Thinking about death and the passage of time is part of tending a garden. You put things in the ground knowing they might fail. You grow things knowing they will die with the frosts six months from now. An acceptance of an end and a celebration of a short, beautiful life is all tucked up

in this one act. People say gardening is therapeutic, that putting your hands in soil and effecting change on the world makes you feel alive and present, like something you do matters even if it’s only in this one terracotta pot. But the therapy runs deeper than physicality: from the start of spring, every month is a countdown to an end. Every year, the gardener accepts, plans for and even celebrates death in the crisping seed heads that sparkle with ice in winter: a visible reminder of both an end and a beginning.

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.