All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

And after an experience in Kosovo – watching a volunteer on the exhumation team climb into the mass grave and retch every day for two weeks, refusing to quit – he knows there is a difference between wanting to go and actually being strong enough to do the job. Workers need to have the practical skills to assist, but they also need to be emotionally resilient: they cannot have suffered recent loss, they cannot be someone who has decided they are on a crusade to right wrongs they have experienced in their own lives.

a mesh tent on a faraway island Kevin has embalmed the drowned passengers of a plane that crashed into the sea, people who would have survived if they had not inflated their life jackets inside the plane and become trapped within it, glued to the ceiling as the ocean rushed in.

I’ve ended up being a bereavement midwife for most of my career. But when you see the difference you can make to parents and their time with their baby, and how that can affect their lives forever, it’s such an important part of midwifery. You can’t control life events – life isn’t in our control – but you can control how you look after a family when they are dealing with the most devastating moment in their lives.’

Cracks in relationships can expand to full breaks under such stress – on this ward, people are at their most vulnerable and their most angry – and sometimes there is a push–pull tension where this blank box sits at the middle of the fight. Everybody grieves in their own way, but family members can judge each other on how they do it, can worry if someone is doing it correctly, can step in and try to take charge if they believe they are doing it wrong. The problem with the memory boxes hinges on the fact that people, sometimes, cannot agree on how much time to spend with a dead body, whether it’s right to record it, whether they should see the body at all – the crux is the idea that grief can be diminished if you try to forget, or if you literally bury it, just like Spain’s Pact of Forgetting. But historical black holes make unsatisfactory graves to bury anything. How do you move on to grieving if, without the finality of seeing, you’re still trapped in disbelief?

‘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.’ Dave tries to befriend them, these ghosts, when he’s out in the cemetery tending to the grounds. There’s the guy with the deck-chair and the newspaper. The mother and son who do a lap of the cemetery daily and read the Quran at the bottom of the garden. But it’s the widowers he struggles with: the old men who travel up on the bus and stand alone in the wind or rain. He says he can’t help but create stories about them, imagining a nagging guilt in the man who buys his dead wife expensive flower arrangements three times a week that Dave, days later, has to put in the bin. It eats at him. He suddenly looks exhausted just talking about it. ‘Eventually you end up avoiding them, because you know they’re going to suck the life out of you just by saying hello.’

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. Tony turns the gas jets on and shoot flames at it directly. The surface glows gold. ‘It’s almost like black coral,’ he says.

I remember the embalmer saying that when friends tell him about a cancer diagnosis, he extrapolates that information to its most extreme end point – death – and I wonder if hearing of a cancer diagnosis will now mean, to me, black coral in a crematorium. From the look on Tony’s face, it’s a hard image to forget. It feels like burying someone with the murder weapon, like something we should remove. Christopher Hitchens described the tumour in his oesophagus that would ultimately kill him as a ‘blind, emotionless alien’. He later wrote, in his posthumously published book Mortality, that it was a mistake to ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. But I think there is no better way to describe a mass of flesh that will not burn, that will outlast its host – at least in an objective physical sense – if only for moments. Blind, emotionless, alien.

you appreciate it more – you’ve seen the other side. To me, the expression is it makes you better. I don’t mean better than somebody else, what I mean is it makes you better in yourself. You will be able to see things better. Do things better. Because you’ve been exposed to things that generally people aren’t going anywhere near. And rightly so.’ I nod. If nothing else, my time being around the dead has made me more patient with people, which might explain why so many death workers have been so patient with me, so open with someone they had only just met. I argue less. I still get angry, but it feels muted. As a champion grudge-holder, I have now forgotten most of them.

The world is full of people telling you how to feel about death and dead bodies, and I don’t want to be one of them – I don’t want to tell you how to feel about anything, I only want you to think about it. Some of the richest, most meaningful and transformative moments of your life may lie beyond where you think your limits currently are. Help dress your dead if you feel you are able, or even if you’re just curious. We are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. Ron Troyer, the retired funeral director, learned this long ago, when he pried that lid off the soldier’s coffin, when the father looked at his son returned from the war; he did not see horror, he saw his boy. I have thought, often, of a woman I met years ago, who told me about her mother dying in hospital. She didn’t go to see her because she didn’t want her final image to be one of death, so she let her mother die alone. She was sixty and had never seen a dead body before, and she imagined that a lifetime of memories could be replaced by a single one in a hospital bed. She believed that it was the image of death that would irreparably break something inside her, rather than the fact of her loss. I think there is urgent, life-changing knowledge to be gained from becoming familiar with death, and from not letting your limits be guided by a fear of unknown things: the knowledge that you can stand to be near it, so that when the time comes