Here are my notes on Hayley Campbell’s All the Living and the Dead.


—

  • (Awareness of) death is, at its core, terrifying — one’s first awareness that one will die, that “it will stop”.
    • Awareness of death yields appreciation of life: “You have to turn the light off to see the glow.”
  • The world is kept separated from death by death workers, people “on the frontline of existence”.
  • “The first dead body you see should be not be someone you love. “You need to be able to separate the shock of death from the shock of grief.” Death and grief as two separate things. Come to terms with death and come to terms with loss (grief), as two separate things.
  • Let them see the body (if they want): “It gets very patriarchal and patronising about what people can cope with. Not everyone needs to see the body, but for some it is a primal need.”
  • See the body to have closure. “Without seeing your son’s remains, or your dead infant’s, they remain alive somehow, psychologically, in a way that all rational thoght cannot defeat. In a plane crash, you could almost fool yourself that they are out there somewhere, that they survived the impact and washed up on a tropical island ,that they are still manoeuvring rocks and logs to spell out SOS on the beach, waiting to be found. Without a body, you are caught in a twilight of death, without the complete darkness you need to reach acceptance.”
    • “I sat there looking at the coffin thinking, Did they really put her in there? What did they do with her?”
    • “How can you move to grief if you’re still trapped in disbelief?”
  • Respect the living. “They can grieve their lost loved ones and can handle grim truth better than you think. But they cannot and will not accept an inadequate response from a company that had no plan for the living or the dead.”
    • “We will advise families, at an early stage, that the body is unlikely to be suitable for viewing. But we’ll explain why, and that’s not the same as denying them.”
  • Leaving the nail polish on a dead body, to remind oneself this was a whole person. “This is a person who lived and died and gave you this gift to learn from”. (Same for tattoos)
  • “Genius or villain, the mind as matter looks much the same.”
  • Treat the deceased like a patient: with respect. “The needs of the patient comes first, and we hold that true here even thoug they’re deceased. We treat them like a patient, we protect their medical records, their name, their privacy, their confidentiality. We maintain that like they are alive.”
  • Donating one’s body is an intimate gift. “Our donors are the best people in the world. It’s a very, very personal gift, giving someone your body. Can you thnk of anything more personal or private? Some of the eighty- or ninety-year-olds — they lived through mini-skirt and all that, this very conservative generation. To allow someone to dissect and go throug hevery bit of their body? It’s quite a sacrifice, to gift someone something that they’ve protected, and been conservative with, all their lives.” (Your body is your temple… (or maybe not))
  • “the fundamental good that is intrinsic in the work that is carried out here”
  • “What is the worst way to die? —Unprepared.”
  • Sontag: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. One starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
  • Deliberate dilution of responsibility: death row executioners: two buttons pressed simultaneously, no one knows which button was live.
    • “Put enough robotics between you and the act and you can fool yourself into believing it barely happened.
    • “If America is serious about killing members of its public, then it should do so with a public audience, perhaps even broadcast the spectacle on television. If we can’t see it, we can’t truly fathom what is happening, and so it continues to fester below the surface of the judicial system unstopped. Seeing someone die by a planned, bureaucratic method can change minds about the death penalty in a way that hearing about it does not. (Norman Mailer, Phil Donahue) “If France truly supported the killing of convicted prisoners, it would haul the guillotine in front of a crowd where it used to be, not hide it behind prison walls and euphemistic speech in the breakfast news reports. If France truly stood by what it was doing, it would show its people the executioner’s hands.” (Camus)
  • Embalming as denying death, making the dead look alive:
    • Embalming: “I ask him if it might be harmful for someone to see the dead body looking dead. He says sometimes it can be a shock that doesn’t help. People don’t want to think about the car crash, or the suicide, or the cancer; they want to think about the life before that — the football match, the afternoon tea. Kevin says his job is to trigger memories so that the focus is on loss, rather than the manner of death.” “What we want to do is impact their senses, so as well as how they look is how they smell: aftershaves, perfumes. They trigger memories.”
  • “Dead bodies cold. Live bodies warm.” — to help separate mentally.
  • “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…” (× a few minutes can change a life — and you can have an impact on these few minutes)
    • Bereavement midwife: “If a family is very unsure, she will offer the baby in stages and ease them into it gradually.” Give them time.
    • “You just have to be kind — always kind — but honest.”
    • Prepare people. Give them time. “You’ll never know those options if you’ve never had somebody discuss it all with you. How would you even image seeing your dead baby, let alone thinking, Do I want hand and footprints or do I want photos or do I want to hold my baby while my baby dies? How do you even think about all these things? The hardest thing for families is looking back and having regrets. In years to come, thinking, I had a chance to hold my baby and I didn’t.
  • Working skillfully with the dead positively impacts the living. “Both of them had their searchlight on the good it does the living.”
  • “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 gravedigger and his feather-light molehills. There is tender care here, if you look for it.
    • “So many of these jobs aren’t limited to the text in the advert.”
  • Nobody takes it all at once. Nobody sees the whole of death (even in the industry). The death machine works because each cog focusses on their one patch.
    • Each death workers has the parts of death they are able to handle — those they are not able to. “The ability to function depends on where you look and where you don’t.”
    • Not to block out things but put them in a context that is meaningful.
    • Your limits to the dead should be personal to you, chosen by you. (Explore & know your limits.) “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 (!)
      • 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 be near it, so that when the time comes you will not let someone you love die alone.
  • Picturing one’s own funeral (and who will attend.) “Standing at the chapel door, looking at the back of the mourners’ heads, he finds it impossible not to picture who might fill the seats at his own funeral one day.”
  • “People who actively do something to deal with a disaster — rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people ot a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals — utilise their stress hormones for their proper purpose an dtherefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised.” (× tsunami response of the couple in How to Know a Person)
  • Desensitization (in a bad way) (crime scene cleaners).
  • “…The press sensationalized it, calling it The Great Train Robbery” (× name land (Made to Stick))