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

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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. Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did.” We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? 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

All the Living and the Dead is not a book to read by the faint of heart as it does contain a number of gruesome details for each vocation. Author, Campbell had the distinct pleasure of not only interviewing the people involved, but also having a hands on experience with some of the interviewees. Campbell deftly describes the gory details and at the same time expertly manages to add a human element to an otherwise inhuman narrative. Hayley Campbell experienced her first loss when she was a pre-teen but before she wrote this book, she’d never seen a dead body. The author developed a curiosity about death as a result, wanting to know what had been concealed from her and the impact that has on us. This blew my mind as I grew up attending wakes with open caskets. (I come from a large German Catholic family.) My relatives modeled what grief looked like and that helped me make sense of things in turn. Campbell weaves judicious reflections on the philosophy and history of the death industry into the reportage . . . Never macabre . . . poignant, transformative." — Financial Times His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. My Review: A book with a truly tragic genesis, the author losing a baby at birth; but it led her to look for her grief to be assuaged in discovering the connective tissue in our society's death industry. She made a terrible tragedy into a very interesting study and came away with the kind of book that many of us read with squeamishness as we're utterly disconnected from death.

About the contributors

The author wrote the book because she wondered how people who have made death their work manage it on a daily basis. “If the reason we’re outsourcing this burden is because it’s too much for us, how do they deal with it?” Campbell interviews many different people associated with death - a funeral director, the director of anatomical services at Mayo Clinic, an embalmer, a crime scene cleaner, a death mask maker, an executioner, anatomic pathology technologist, bereavement midwife, gravediggers, crematorium operator, and even people at a cryonics institute. I learned that there are many more people involved with death than I ever thought, and with their varied viewpoints, I also learned that it's far more than just a job to many of them. The care and respect they feel and show in their work is evident, even if it's work that most people will never see and may not be appreciated. There are a few morbid details, but Campbell gets involved in some of these details, such as dressing a corpse, handling a brain during an autopsy, and raking remains from the crematorium. This helps to make them seem just a little less morbid. 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? The only part that really grossed me out was when the author wrote about watching the anatomical pathology technologist perform an autopsy. She describes in detail how "the tongue and oesophagus, with vocal cords, came out in one piece. It looked like a long fillet of pork."

Author and journalist Hayley Campbell is not one who runs from death. For this book, she interviewed many people who work with the dead. These include: Embalmers, cremators, anatomical pathology technologists (yeh, I hadn't heard of them before either), grave diggers, executioners (countries like the US still have the barbaric death penalty, though most modern democracies have abolished it), and even a man who makes death masks. 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. Joyce doesn’t take life away from Gabriel, just the protection of his self-delusions. After this night, Gabriel will have to live life knowingly in the shadow of the dead.

Introduction by Ashley Pharoah

An intriguing, candid, and frequently poignant book that asks what the business of death can teach all of us in the midst of life. Readers will form a connection with Campbell's voice as intimate as her own relationship with mortality." —Lindsey Fitzharris, bestselling author of The Butchering Art

A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people—morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners—who work in it and what led them there.

Reviews

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. How should we live, when death is always with us? All the Living and the Dead is a book about death, and how to stop pretending about it. Hayley Campbell is working out a philosophy of death by getting close to it; holding it; asking interesting questions of people who spend their lives dealing with it. This is an essential, compassionate, honest examination of how we deal with death, and how it changes the living.” — Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.” — Kirkus (starred)

Starring Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer, The Living And The Dead was created by Ashley Pharoah. The executive producers are Ashley Pharoah for Monastic Productions and Faith Penhale and Katie McAleese for BBC Wales Drama Production. Eliza Mellor is producer and Alice Troughton and Sam Donovan direct. As someone who used to work in end-of-life care, I have a lot of opinions about books centered around death and loss. I want everyone to have better understanding about this important topic and have high standards as a result. This is a really strong, well-written book but it could have been even stronger with a few changes. Two additional professions should have been profiled: a hospice nurse or CNA and someone who provides physician-assisted dying. I’m obviously biased toward the inclusion of hospice and palliative care but it’s a puzzling omission regardless. Hospice provides a unique form of support throughout the dying process and yet a lot of people have never heard of it or misunderstand what it means. As far as physician-assisted dying, it can be a dicey issue so I can understand why the author might not want to wade in those particular waters. At the same time, she chose to include the Cryonics Institute so it’s not as if she shied away anything that might raise eyebrows. It's not at all what i was expecting. It's an extraordinary journey, through scenes and characters so chilling they have their own crystalline beauty. The writing is finely felt and full of life, Campbell always finding a way to look through horror, to see humanity. So many of the images in it are heart-stopping, and by the end I was surprised to find myself sobbing. It's superb.” ⁠— Rhik Samadder, author of I Never Said I Loved YouA careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights. This is a brave tour through the valley of the shadow. I am happy to welcome Hayley Campbell to the Death community.” — Catharine Arnold, author of Necropolis: London and its Dead 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. All the Living and the Dead is an amazing book. As I get older, sign up for Medicare and begin to face my own mortality in a more serious way, I have looked for books to help with this process. There is not a lot out there, and I hesitated before requesting this book from Netgalley, but Hayley Campbell has written about death and the many different people associated with it so well that I found the book informative and beautiful. Hayley Campbell experienced her first loss when she was a pre-teen but before she wrote this book, she’d never