All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

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