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

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This realisation arrived in the maelstrom of her crisis about her job. Conversations long ignored were now being had. When it was clear that both of her parents were going to survive, she saved some money, quit the art world and went to Ghana for a break. There she got typhoid and nearly died too. 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 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.

The series is set in an isolated Somerset valley in 1894, a place where the implications of the industrial revolution are still being keenly felt, a place where centuries of living a certain wayof life are coming abruptly to an end. Into this place comes Nathan Appleby and his young wife, Charlotte. Nathan charming, intelligent, is a brilliant London psychologist, a pioneer in that new science. Many of his troubled patients come to him as a result of that Victorian obsession with death and the afterlife, damaged by mesmerism, mediums, Ouija boards, automatic writing. Nathan is a man of science, and believes that everything has a rational explanation. Charlotte Appleby is his vivacious, independent wife, herself something of a pioneer as a leading society photographer in London. When they inherit the run-down farm of Shepzoy House, none of their friends expect them to actually go and live there and learn to be farmers, but the Applebys have lived there for generations and his sense of duty and belonging is powerful. 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?Fuelled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers from the people who choose to make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, Campbell encounters funeral directors, embalmers, a man who dissects cadavers for anatomy students, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She sits in a van with gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, holds a brain at an autopsy, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, and goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective. In her spare time she became a Samaritan, volunteering to answer the phones at the charity that provides emotional support to those feeling lost or suicidal. But as her job became busier, as the travel kept her further away from home, her shifts would get missed or moved. ‘It made me very sad. I spent about two years just not having the answer. I was having a sort of quarter-life crisis.’ She knew she wanted to engage with regular people on the frontline of existence, to do something that mattered – birth, love or death, it wasn’t important which – but she couldn’t figure out how, or what, until life began to make the decision for her. Campbell weaves judicious reflections on the philosophy and history of the death industry into the reportage . . . Never macabre . . . poignant, transformative." — Financial Times 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 ]

Except when someone we know, or as in the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II with near constant news coverage of someone famous, dies most of us go about our lives oblivious to the fact that there is dying all around. The Living And The Dead is available as a BBC iPlayer box set now and will also air on BBC One from Tuesday 28 June.All the Living and the Dead is by Hayley Campbell, a prolific writer and journalist from the UK who has written for numerous publications, including BuzzFeed, GQ, and the Guardian. This is her second book, following The Art of Neil Gaiman, which she published in 2014. I am not sure of what to say except that Campbell did something extraordinary. She helped make the connections to why we feel the need to look away from death ~ and also to stare at it. This book was full of humanity. Readers who share Campbell's healthy obsession will appreciate both her meticulous reporting and her marked compassion.” — Booklist (starred) Death is everywhere, but it's veiled, or it's fiction. Just like in the video games, the bodies disappear." Reading this sentence in the introduction reminded me of the reports of deaths earlier on during the never-ending pandemic of Covid. We would hear on the news of many deaths but as we survived in our 'pods' it didn't seem real. We were removed from the action so to speak. Where was the evidence of so many deaths? We might ask whether Gabriel’s final epiphany in ‘The Dead’ represents a permanent and life-changing shift in his attitudes – the dawning of empathy, perhaps – or whether Joyce is inviting us to view the change in his mood as temporary.