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

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Gripping . . . Campbell is a sharp and witty observer who successfully conveys her own fascination with the subject. A vivid and open-minded look at a taboo topic." — Publishers Weekly Eye-opening . . . A book about corpses might seem like a downer. But All the Living and the Dead is surprisingly cheerful, even life-affirming. This is partly thanks to Campbell's open-hearted, observant style of writing, which manages to be vivid without sensationalizing the horrors she records." — Times Literary Supplement A digression. No one think it more praiseworthy to undergo anything else without help with pain, is this the biblical 'In pain you will bring forth children and to your husband you will turn and he will have authority over you,' since we have abandoned the latter half, or most of us have, why has the first part remained? Pity the Amish (who still abide by the second half as well) and Scientologists neither of whom are allowed any pain relief or to make the slightest noise during labour and birth. I wonder if they actually manage that? It was interesting getting to know the people who do the jobs most of us would be unable or unwilling to do. I enjoyed (ok, maybe enjoyed isn't exactly the right verb.... appreciated perhaps?) learning about the processes performed in: preparing bodies for burial, discovering the cause of death, and using bodies to further scientific knowledge. However, it stayed with the author, led her into a kind of depression where she couldn't even work, and right up to the end of the book writes quite frequently about how this dead baby slipping under the water affected her. It got a bit wearisome. I wasn't really into the continual repetition of the author's mental state.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, falling into the waves. It was falling too upon every part of the churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crosses and headstones, on the spears of the gate, on the thorns. His soul swooned as he heard the snow falling through the universe and falling, like the descent of their end, upon all the living and the dead. I have always wondered about the toll of the role of executioner. The author interviews an executioner who explains that the person on death row for several years is already gone. "They're ready to accept whatever and get it over with." What's left behind are the staff that complete the execution. a b c d "Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer set to thrill in new supernatural BBC One drama The Living And The Dead" . Retrieved 7 August 2015.I try to figure out the path between hectic art auction house and running a funeral home and I cannot begin to make a guess. ‘I meet people who have a much clearer reason for doing this kind of thing,’ she says, laughing. ‘For me, it wasn’t like that at all.’ The way she tells it, the route may have been winding, but her motivation is lucid, even if she couldn’t see it at the time. Mysterious, yet nostalgic, Isolubilia is truly an ode to the romance found in the pursuit of a mystery. Musically rich in turbulence and serenity, majesty and humbleness, this album made me feel both lonely, yet understood as an isolated individual. Perhaps we're all fellow romantics, looking up at the same night sky, trying to wring our own meaning out of the stars. I hope that pursuit never ends. The John go to album

As a former hospice social worker, I felt a sense of kinship when I came across Iredale’s words. I was good at my work and believed strongly in its importance but I was always aware of what my presence meant for the patients and families I worked with. No one wants to need hospice, even the ones who didn’t think twice about signing up. Death is a part of life, a painful, inevitable part. Yet we as a society so often pretend as if it isn’t, to our great detriment. It’s that something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. That sigh in your ear. It’s the worm in a cider apple. The maggots in the dead deer. The sound of a crow on a summer’s day. The other side of that coin, however, was my discovery that there are certain souls, who if there is a god deserve a total and complete remission from their sins, who specialize in bereavement midwifery. How very, very beautiful a soul those people must possess. How vast their reserves of kindness and empathy must be. And how deeply glad I am that they do this job.Through Campbell's probing, reverent interviews with these people who see death every day, Campbell pieces together the psychic jigsaw to ask: Why would someone choose a life of working with the dead? And what does dealing with death every day do to you as a person? The ghostly apparitions in the village and Appleby's growing insanity are revealed to be the result of meddling by his great great granddaughter, a 21st century paranormal investigator haunted by the restless spirit of Appleby's drowned son. Great work of nonfiction exploring the concept of death. It ranges from embalmers, funeral directors, crime scene cleaners, executioners, and even murderers. Campbell meets with professionals within these fields and we get an insight in how it works and how they feel about it, how they got into it, etc. Really interesting and insightful as well. I thought this would be a little triggering for me as I did lose a friend earlier this year however, it was done in a way where I didn’t feel triggered. It’s done in a compassionate way which I really respect. 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:

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. 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. 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. Campbell’s immersion in death is free of trauma . . . startling and affecting, candid, compassionate." — London Review of Books When the pandemic began I was in the middle of writing a book about how not only do we not talk about death – despite the fact that we have filled our pop culture with it – but that we have created a whole industry of people who serve as a barrier between us and death in a physical sense. A body does not magically disappear, or transport itself to the grave. There are people who shepherd it from deathbed to cemetery plot, who care for it where we do not go.”At the end, as he’s lifted us into the dark poetry of Gabriel’s vision, separating our perception from the experience of the man and letting us glide unfettered in the gentle cushion of the winter night, Joyce brings us down firmly with his final phrase.

A great book describing what happens when we die. The author is a journalist and her deeply personal story on discovering death makes the whole book. If you were ever curious about death and the people that work with the dead, All the Living and the Dead is a must read. It contains a behind the scenes look at the people whose vocations revolve around death on a daily basis. From funeral directors, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, grave diggers, and even cremators. There is something for everyone. But my personal favorites were the embalmer and the cremator. Totally gross, but extremely interesting.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. A young boy is haunted by the ghosts of five workhouse orphans who suffocated years earlier in an accident in the tin mine owned by Appleby's grandfather.