All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners

Book Preface

You aren’t born knowing you will die. Someone has to break the news. I asked my dad if it was him, but he can’t remember.
Some people remember being told: they have a moment they can pinpoint where life cleaved into before and after. They can remember the sound of a bird hitting the window, breaking its neck on the glass before the fall. They can recall the situation being explained to them as the limp, feathered body was peeled off the patio and buried in the garden, the dusty imprint of their wings lasting longer than the funeral. Maybe death came to you in the form of a goldfish or a grandparent. You might have processed mortality as much as you were able, or needed to, in the time it took for the fins to disappear in the swirl of a toilet bowl.
I don’t have one of those moments. I can’t remember a time be-fore death existed. Death was just there, everywhere, always.
Maybe it began with the five dead women. Throughout my single digits, my dad – Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist – was working on a graphic novel called From Hell, written by Alan Moore. It’s about Jack the Ripper and shows the full horror of his brutality in scratchy black and white. ‘Jackarippy’ was such a part of our lives that my tiny sister would wear the top hat to eat breakfast, and I would stand on tiptoes to study the crime scenes that were pinned to my dad’s drawing board while trying to get him to agree to something Mum had said no to. There they were, the disembowelled women, the flesh torn from their faces and thighs. Next to them, the stark autopsy photographs, their sagging breasts and bellies, the pinched rugby-ball stitching from neck to groin. I remember looking up at them and feeling not shocked, but fascinated. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to see more. I wished the pictures were clearer, I wished they were in colour. Their situation was so removed from anything I knew of life that it was too other to be frightening – it was as alien to me there in tropical Brisbane, Australia, as the foggy London streets where they had lived. To look at those same photographs now is an entirely different thing – I see violence, the struggle and misogyny, the lost lives – but back then, I didn’t have the emotional language to process something so terrible. It flew above my level of compre-hension, but somewhere up there the bird hit the windowpane. Ever since then I have been peeling the body off the patio, holding it up to the light.
At seven I was much the same as I am now as a journalist: I put it down on paper in an attempt to figure it out. I sat beside my dad at an upturned cardboard box that I called my desk and I copied him, creating a felt-tip compendium of all the ways a human being could die, violently: twenty-four pages of people being murdered, pieced to-gether from what I’d seen in movies, on TV, on the news, on his desk. They were cut up with machetes while they were sleeping, they were stabbed in the woods while hitchhiking, they were boiled by witches, buried alive, left to hang for the birds to eat. A drawing of a skull with the explanatory caption ‘If someone chops your head off and your skin rots you look like this.’ My dad bought a kidney from the butcher for a scene in the comic and laid it out on a handkerchief in the sitting room to paint. As it quickly turned rotten in the heat I drew the same scene beside him, only mine was more honest: it included the gathering cloud of flies. He kept all of my pages in a binder and proudly showed them off to horrified guests.
Death was outside the house too. We lived on a busy street where cats had shorter lifespans and turned up stiff in gutters; we lifted them by the tail like frying pans and buried them at dawn, quiet little ceremonies for cats we knew and cats we didn’t. The walking route to school was altered in summer whenever a bird, usually a magpie, would die and decompose. It was something that wouldn’t bear mentioning in cooler climates, but their decomposition was so fast in the soaring Australian heat that one bird could render a whole street impassable. Our headmaster would suggest avoiding that route until the smell of death had blown through it. I’d always walk the forbidden route to school, hoping to see the rancid bird so I could look it in the face.
Scenes of death had become familiar: I would often do my homework on the back of a photocopy of a drawing my dad had done, a spare piece of paper mindlessly picked off the top of the recycling pile. ‘It’s a dead prostitute,’ I would tell my teacher, as she held up the offending pool of black blood and gore, speechlessly. ‘It’s only drawings.’ Death seemed to be something that happened, and something that happened a lot. But I was being told it was bad, a secret, like I’d been caught trespassing. ‘Inappropriate’, as my teacher said on the phone to my parents.
It was a Catholic school. Our priest, Father Power – a mumbling Irishman who was, to me, impossibly old, yet could occasionally be seen leaping up and down on the contents of the skip in his priestly vestments in order to cram more rubbish inside it before the garbage collectors came – would sit us down once a week, at the front of the church, and speak to us plainly. He would pull out a chair and park it somewhere by the altar, using the stained-glass windows above to tell the story of Jesus hauling his cross to the place where he would die on it. One afternoon, Father Power pointed up at a red light to the left of the altar and said that when that light was glowing, God was in the house – it was powered by Him. I looked up at it, a red glowing bulb in an ornate brass cage, and asked why – if God was powering it – was there an extension lead running up the wall and down the chain that suspended it? There was a beat, a cleared throat, and the priest effectively said, ‘No further questions at this time’ before moving on to something else, forevermore considering me to be A Problem that required meetings with my parents (one proud, one embarrassed) and me being barred from ever getting involved in the bread and wine part of Mass.
It bothered me that he had tried to spin something magical and ghostly out of something electric, and from then on I regarded organised religion with suspicion. It seemed like a dodge, a panacea, some nice-sounding lies. Heaven felt a bit too easy, like a package holiday if you were good. I still had another dozen years of Catholic school to go, and the red bulb shone a warning light over everything religion offered in the way of an answer.
The first actual dead person I knew was my friend Harriet, who drowned rescuing her dog in a flooded creek when we were twelve. I remember almost nothing of the funeral, no eulogy, nor any of the teachers who came or if any of them cried. I don’t re-member where Belle the surviving black Labrador sat, or if she stayed at home. All I remember is sitting in a pew, staring at a closed white coffin, wanting to know what was in it. Every magi-cian knows that sticking a closed box in the middle of a group of people is a recipe for sustained suspense – all I did was stare. My friend was there, mere feet away, but hidden from me. It was frus-trating and hard to grasp the concept of someone being there, and then not, with nothing tangible to confirm it. I wanted to see her. I felt like I was missing something in addition to missing a friend. I felt like something was being kept from me. Wanting to see, and wanting to know the fact of it all but not being able to, was a block in front of my grief. Did she still look like my friend, or had she changed? Did she smell like the magpies?
I didn’t fear death, I was captivated by it. I wanted to know what happened to the cats when we put them in the ground. I wanted to know why birds stink and what made them fall from the trees. I had books full of skeletons – human, animal, dino-saur – and would poke at my skin trying to picture my own. At home I had my questions answered, clumsily but honestly. I was praised for drawing it, and was shown, cat after heartbreaking cat, that it is an inevitability, sometimes messy, sometimes not. At school I was told to look away – from the birds, from the drawings, from my dead friend – and was given other images of death in every classroom and church: ones that told me death was temporary. To me, there was more truth in the photographs of the Ripper victims; no one told me they were coming back, but school said Jesus did, and would again. I was being handed a ready-made conceptual framework to replace the one I had begun to build for myself, that I had pieced together from ex-perience. Through skirted questions and reactions to things I thought were simple facts, I was taught that death was taboo and something to fear.
We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our novels, our video games – it is in our superhero comics, where it can be reversed on monthly whim. It is in the minutiae of the true-crime podcasts that saturate the internet. It is in our nursery rhymes, our museums, our movies about beautiful murdered women. But the footage is edited, the decapitated head of the journalist is pixelated, the words of the old songs are sanitised for modern youth. We hear about people burning to death in their flats, planes disappearing into the sea, men in trucks mowing down pedestrians, but it’s difficult to comprehend. The real and the imaginary intermingle, become background noise. Death is everywhere, but it’s veiled, or it’s fiction. Just like in video games, the bodies disappear.
But the bodies have to go somewhere. Sitting there in that church, staring at my friend’s white coffin, I knew that other people had pulled her from the water, dried her, carried her there; other people had cared for her where we could not.
On average, 6,324 people in the world die every hour – that’s 151,776 every day, about 55.4 million a year. That’s more than the population of Australia falling off the planet every six months. For most of those deaths in the Western world, there will be a phone call. Someone with a gurney will collect the body and transport it to the mortuary. If needed, another person will be called to clean the place where the body lay quietly decomposing until the neighbours complained, burning an outline into the mattress like a liquid victim of Pompeii. If there’s no family, another person will be paid to clear the apartment of everything that once made up a lonely life: the shoes, the subscription magazines on the doormat, the piles of books that never got read after all, the food in the fridge that outlasted its owner, the things to be taken to auction, the things to be driven to the dump. At the funeral home, an em-balmer might try to make the body look less dead, more sleeping.