When I think of people who work with the dead, I think of people who work in funeral homes, including funeral directors and embalmers, police detectives and that’s about it. However, in her entertaining book All the Living and the Dead, Haley Campbell identified several more professions that work with the dead, including crime scene cleaner and death mask sculptor. She did, however, skip the death scene investigator.
Campbell explains that she became fascinated with death when her cartoonist father was working on a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. Campbell started doing drawings of her own and was fascinated by not on the the fact that someone could be alive one moment and dead the next, but also by what physically happened to a body when it died.
All the Living and the Dead, follows Campbell as she seeks to better understand death and those that work with it. Her first interview with a death worker is when she visits Poppy’s funeral home in London and gets to assist in preparing a body for a viewing. She also learns about bodies donated to scene when she visits with Terry, who runs the Anatomical Services lab at the Mayo Clinic in MN. He is responsible for taking care of the bodies and making sure they are respected. Part of his role is dissecting bodies prior to classes so that if medical students are studying hips, that is what they see. However, although parts of his job are gruesome and bloody, Terry always makes sure to maintain his patients humanity such as the time after doctors were practicing face transplants, he made sure that the faces were swapped back so that every person left his morgue for cremation or burial with the correct face.
Another death related career that Campbell explored was disaster victim identification. She interviewed Mark Oliver from Kenyon whose job it was to assemble teams to fly to disaster sites at a moment’s notice to help with identifying the dead. The company also helped with the softer side of disaster recovery, including fielding questions from the media and making arrangements for family members to fly to disaster sites. Kenyon has considered things that few people think about when preparing for disasters, such as not serving barbecued meat at a fire site. Their warehouses are packed with gear designed to retrieve and identify human remains to help grieving families.
It was not the overwhelming gruesomeness of disaster recovery or even crime scene cleaning that most impacted Campbell, it was when she was observing an Anatomical Pathology Technician do an autopsy on a baby and when the baby was being washed it slipped beneath the water and even though it was already dead, Campbell felt as if she was watching the child drown. That moment more than anything seemed to make the fragility of life and the finality of death real for Campbell, and it led her to seek out a death worker who hadn’t been on her original list: a bereavement midwife.
Bereavement midwife’s help mothers whose children are stillborn or who die shortly after birth. If it is known that a child will not survive, they are taken to a special wing at Heartland Hospital in Birmingham so they will not be exposed to the happiness and joy that normally accompanies a child’s birth. The special Eden Ward at Heartland caters to parents who will not go home with a child. The specially trained midwifes are there to help parents with their loss by providing tiny caskets and by doing what they can to memorializing these tiny lives.
As a thanatologist, I seek out a lot of books on death, but this book was an impulse read that I’m really glad I read. Most of it is upbeat and provides a sense of how carrying people who work with the dead–and their living loved ones–really are.