ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: A quest for those who have made death their life’s work, from embalmers to executionersby Haley Campbell
Conceptually, death is just a tragedy. But it also comes with certain afflictions that many people are not prepared for. It’s a scourge of logistics and bureaucracy. There are papers to fill out, possessions to ship, professionals to hire, and rituals to organize. Many of us don’t like to think about the mundane details of death. An entire industry exists to help people bypass such procedural necessity, wait invisibly until called, and take action to prevent the living from encountering the dead. .
“By living in a state of manufactured denial, on the line between innocence and ignorance, are we cultivating fear that reality does not justify?” Haley Campbell, in her new book All the Living and the Dead”. “I wanted a vision of death that wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t poetic, it wasn’t sanitized. I wanted the bare, banal reality of this thing to bring to all of us.”
Her pursuit leads her to the unseen labor that powers the death industry. Journalist Campbell, who has appeared in Wired and The Guardian, observes embalmers injecting fluid into cold arteries and funeral directors shirts torsos that have turned purple from clotted blood. She is tempered by the gallows humor of the gravedigger who buried her own mother and the cryonics operator tasked with keeping clients’ bodies frozen until science can bring them back to life. Record optimism.
Campbell describes these working mechanisms in comprehensive detail, explaining them with just the right amount of levity so that the stench of death does not overwhelm the pages. she admits with a hilarious, friendly aside while watching an autopsy at a medical conference. She wanted to see the dead man’s penis.
Throughout the report, Campbell poses core questions to each subject. How can they psychologically cope with facing the reality of death every day? Most of her characters don’t have much to say about this. It’s a job I’ve gotten used to over time. “The death machine works because each cog concentrates on one patch, corner, beat on her. Doll factory workers paint faces and send dolls elsewhere for hair. ,” she concludes Campbell.
The consistency of their answers may reflect a cultural uniformity that limits the book’s depth. , neither broad enough to reach a universally universal truth about death nor focused enough to reveal revelations about a particular community. is most clear in the chapter that summarizes in a few lines. The Toraja “regularly remove the dead from their graves, wash and clothe them, offer them gifts, and light cigarettes”. Waited for my daughter to fall asleep. For example, on Chicago’s South Side, a funeral director organizing a memorial service filled with his teens mourning a friend who was gunned down, or a crime scene photographer who keeps taking pictures of the massacre in a classroom. Etc. Debate over gun control. A limited scope means that the opportunity to explore the wider social implications of death is lost.
In the years before Covid-19 swept every corner of the world, Campbell reported and wrote “All the Living and Dead.” Some of us are more familiar with death than we were three years ago, but the pandemic that has delivered a wave of fear that disproportionately affects the most privileged has made death an inevitable part of life. It showed that everything that precedes death, even though it is not a fact. Then the same hierarchy that guides life is reflected. But Campbell’s proposition becomes true as rising death tolls return to normal and those alive acquire a new sense of numbness.
Albert Samaha is a BuzzFeed News journalist and author of two books, including Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortune.
All Living and Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, A Survey of Those Who Made Death Their Life’s Work, Hayley Campbell | 268 Pages | St. Martin’s Press | $29.99
