All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade

Product Information

For people who are less familiar with death workers, this should prove to be an eye-opening read. I’m grateful Campbell was allowed to run with her curiosity and ask the questions she did. I hope it leads to more introspection and reflection about our own end-of-life wishes, as well as those of our loved ones. In her book, Campbell interviews a funeral director, director of anatomical services, death mask sculptor, disaster victim identification, crime scene cleaner, executioner, embalmer, anatomical pathology technologist, bereavement midwife, gravedigger, crematorium operator and an employee from the Cryonics Institute. The variety of people and jobs was well rounded and each employee provided a new aspect to consider. In this profoundly moving and remarkable book, journalist Hayley Campbell explores society's attitudes towards death, and the impact on those who work with it every day. 'If the reason we're outsourcing this burden is because it's too much for us,' she asks, 'how do they deal with it?' Would facing death directly make us fear it less? Another interesting fact to consider is that "nobody sees the whole of death, even if death is their job." Different people from various facets of the death industry complete the separate steps. "Nobody collects the dead body from the roadside, autopsies it, embalms it, dresses it and pushes it into the fire." Each person completes the task within their specific area and then passes the body to the person who carries out the next stage of the process.

The Living and the Dead is a British six-episode supernatural horror television series created by Ashley Pharoah. The plot revolves around Nathan Appleby (played by Colin Morgan) and his wife, Charlotte Appleby (played by Charlotte Spencer), whose farm is believed to be at the centre of numerous supernatural occurrences. [1] Cast [ edit ] Main cast [ edit ] Death is an interesting topic and one we will all eventually come to know first hand. It's a taboo topic in some circles, and too painful to discuss in others but like Hayley Campbell, it's always been of interest to me. As a kid, I remember a photograph I saw in a book of an adult who had died in their armchair as a result of spontaneous combustion. The idea that a body could catch fire or burst into flames at any moment was a frightening discovery and probably the first time I'd seen a photo of a dead body. I enjoyed All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell, however most telling were probably the number of books from the further reading section that I’ve read on this subject over the years: The series was created by Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes co-creator Ashley Pharoah. Pharoah's creative partner Matthew Graham was initially attached to the series, but withdrew prior to its production to work on Childhood's End for SyFy. [14] The series is directed by Alice Troughton and Sam Donovan. [2] Casting [ edit ] The opening line of ‘The Dead’ is an example of this method, and has been the subject of much critical analysis:An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Where do we go when we die? Not our souls, not our spirits, but our corporeal wrapping of blood and bone, sinew and soft tissue. Who takes care of the dead for us when we cannot? And perhaps, more importantly, what leads these same people to face this starkest reality, the intimate stripping of mortal illusion, in our stead? Campbell weaves judicious reflections on the philosophy and history of the death industry into the reportage... Never macabre... poignant... Transformative Throughout ‘The Dead’, Joyce brings us closer to the (inner) speech of the characters, principally Gabriel Conroy, while also allowing some degree of detachment from those characters: the effect is akin to a film camera going in for a close-up so we can observe a character’s mood and emotions, before switching to a long or wide shot of the room. Joyce artfully balances detachment against intimacy, free indirect discourse against narratorial objectivity, throughout the story.

A surprising fact I learned through reading this book: "After a violent death, there is no US government agency that comes to clean up the blood." I hadn't realized that the homeowner is responsible for either cleaning up themselves or employing a professional crime scene cleaner. Interesting was the special maternity unit for women who were going to deliver a dead baby or one who would die soon after birth. A quiet, calm place, where there were no screams of pain from women in unmedicated labour. There are cooling cots so that the baby can remain with the parents until they are ready to let the baby be buried. And midwives who dedicate themselves to delivering only dead babies in sadness, although they train to deliver in joy, one of the few medical procedures that is generally joyous. Special women, very compassionate and empathetic. A benediction granted not from the altar of faith but the altar of life, where a man’s accumulated experience and misbegotten acts become the trapdoor that he opens to look inward, only to find that within there is the same thing as without: nothing. They've got to carry on his death. His death lives through them until they die. It's going to be part of them, and eventually they will break." What follows is the description of how many executioners have committed suicide due to the heavy burden of taking someone else's life. The author began this book as a look at the people who work behind the scenes to care for the dead, and to help the living who are grieving them. She even admits that at the onset of writing this book she thought that it would be a straightforward process as she followed the body from death to burial or cremation. It turned out to be a work of much greater scope.Since I woke up an hour and half ago, around 9,486 people around the world have died. 151,776 die every day, about 55.4 million people a year. (If you've just woken up and are trying to enjoy your morning coffee when you read this review, I'm sorry to get your day started on such a bleak note.) A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people―morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners―who work in it and what led them there.