All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

I didn’t fear death, I was captivated by it. I wanted to know what happened to the cats when we put them in the ground. I wanted to know why birds stink and what made them fall from the trees.

I believe an interest in death is not just for the morbid: it has a mental gravitational pull unlike anything else. Becker considered death to be both the ender and the propeller of the world. When people want answers they find them in churches, in therapy rooms, up mountains or on high seas. But I’m a journalist, and when your job is asking questions, you come to believe – or hope – that answers are in other people.

The Western death industry is predicated on the idea that we cannot, or need not, be there. But if the reason we’re outsourcing this burden is because it’s too much for us, how do they deal with it? They are human too. There is no us and them. It’s just us.

I wanted to know whether we are cheating ourselves out of some fundamental human knowledge by doing things this way. By living in this manufactured state of denial, in the borderlands between innocence and ignorance, are we nurturing a fear that reality doesn’t warrant? Is there an antidote to the fear of death in knowing exactly what happens? In seeing exactly what happens?

Here they become people again, not a patient or a victim or a fighter in a battle against their own body. Here they are finished, just waiting to be washed and dressed, then buried or burned.

I remember the filmmaker David Lynch, in an interview, talking about visiting a mortuary when he was a young art student in Philadelphia – he had met the nightwatchman in a diner and asked if he could come see it. Sitting on the mortuary floor, the door closed behind him, it was the stories in all of these bodies that got to him: who they were, what they did, how they got there. Like him, it’s the scale of it, both large and small, that sweeps over me like a wave: all of these people, all of these individual libraries of collected experience, all of them ending here.

The sound of the living is unbelievably loud when you’ve been in the company of the dead.

For weeks after dressing the dead man at the funeral home, I kept thinking about what a waste death is. A body that has spent years growing, repairing itself, retaining knowledge of viruses and diseases and immunity, is just buried or burned.

To allow someone to dissect and go through every bit of their body? It’s quite a sacrifice, to gift someone something that they’ve protected, and been conservative with, all their lives.

The only thing that got me were the hands, with their perfectly polished nails or roughly bitten ones – that student was right. Hands retain a personality even after they are severed. They are things that people held, they’re the thing we’re supposed to know the back of better than anything.

They want to preserve the essence of a life only when that life has gone, so there is always an element of sadness in a death mask; they exist only because of a loss.

Without a body, you are caught in a twilight of death, without the complete darkness you need to reach acceptance.

Plug ‘rotten.com’ into the URL bar now and nothing comes up, the website is defunct. But once upon a time it was there, programmed in the stripped-back, basic html any teenager taught themselves when starting a GeoCities website in the 1990s. It was a collection of disease, violence, torture, death, human depravity and cruelty in one grainy jpeg after another. There were the famous, and there were the nobodies: the unidentified, the unidentifiable.

Had he left it, he would have learned what he found out years later: that exploded brain dries like marble. It is still the hardest thing to clean.

Images of death can be all around us, but we no longer process them as such because of their ubiquity. We are so accustomed to their presence, we become numb to them. You walk into a church and do not think anew that this is a tortured man, dead on a cross.

Andy Warhol was brought up a Catholic and was obsessed with images of death. How could he not be – it’s a religion built on them.

He was a victim of images that held the power to haunt him, and through his art he tried to fight against that power, rather than seize real-life opportunities to see death as anything other than horrifying. His beautiful avoidance behaviour hangs in galleries around the world.

I wanted to know how someone who has ended lives by planned, state-sanctioned murder deals with the psychological pressure of that fact. What does death mean to him if it is just another tier of punishment that can be handed down in a court of law? Does he fear death more or less now that he has seen not only the bodies, but the moment it happens?

‘Throughout the early modern period, and indeed through the Revolution as well,’ writes Friedland, ‘one of the most effective means of impugning someone’s moral character was to insinuate that they had been seen dining with the executioner.’

I’ve always been wary of anyone using religion as a shield, or a proxy; to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter, it’s someone else doing it. They’re only following orders from above.

He spoke about how the gradual decline in religion over the decades has changed the role of funeral directors, from one of a mere functionary – who dealt with the disposal of the body while the church took care of the soul and grief – to one that now encompasses some kind of bereavement counselling; and how at the University of Minnesota, which he attended himself and where he later taught, the percentage of women in funeral training has gone from almost nothing to 85 per cent of the class.

‘Let’s face it,’ he says, walking me to the front door. ‘We’re all producing a manufactured world of some kind. You’re producing a word picture. Ours involves the dramaturgy of the funeral.’

These days in the US, more than 3 million litres of embalming fluid, complete with carcinogenic formaldehyde, are buried every year.

You don’t get a cancer survival story in the prep room: you just see, as Kevin calls it, ‘the inevitable end point’.

‘There’s a denial of death in England,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to know us unless something happens, then we’re their best friend for the next two weeks. After that, we don’t exist again.’

Neither he nor Lara can explain why they are not squeamish, or why they can do this every day – Lara doesn’t even mind working on the decomposed bodies; she is fascinated by how much people can change, how much life is still going on after death – but both of them have their searchlight on the good it does the living.

‘No one wants praise, no one does this for the glory of it, but you do kind of want some acknowledgement that what you do matters. It matters to the families.’

‘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!”’

‘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?’

Some of the world’s most famous architecture, our most beloved wonders, are graves. The pyramids of Egypt. India’s Taj Mahal. Monuments built to house the dead.

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.

I tell Dennis my theory that the transhumanist movement, into which cryonics tends to get lumped, seems to be mostly men because women watch their bodies start to fail earlier, in predictable stages, and that with their closer relationship to blood and birth, they’re maybe more accepting of death and therefore less afraid – which might explain the numbers now weighted towards women working in the funeral industry.

‘Anyone that says cryonics is absolutely going to work is not a scientist. Anyone who says that it absolutely won’t happen is not a scientist,’ he says. ‘The only way to find these things out is through the scientific method, which is running the experiment. We’re basically all in a collective experiment in cryonics. Self-funded, no federal funding, no outside funding. Anyone else who is getting buried or burned is in the control group. Me, I’d rather be in the experimental group than the control group.’

It’s a Jewish tradition to place a small stone by the grave every time you visit. A rabbi told me it’s because, unlike flowers, stones do not fade. It’s about the permanence of memory, of things lasting beyond their given time on earth.

Toni Morrison wrote that anything coming back to life hurts, and I believe her. Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did.

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.’

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.

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.

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 you will not let someone you love die alone.

‘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,’ goes the William Gladstone quote,

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.