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

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Yes, there is a lot to learn, and yes, some of their ideas about modernising the farm are met with surly incomprehension from their workers, but the sun shines and the wheat grows and harvest beckons. Featuring interviews with death workers across a range of professions, this stands out from similar books by including jobs that don’t often get their due, like crime scene cleaner, gravedigger, and crematorium operator, and those that we might not know as much about, like death mask sculptor and disaster victim identification.

The only part that really grossed me out was when the author wrote about watching the anatomical pathology technologist perform an autopsy.Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives.

It manages the astonishing balancing act of conveying Hayley Campbell's own fascination with Death, the dead, and the people who deal with death in one or other of its manifestations, while also allowing us to feel what she feels for the living and the dead. I realize I'm very much in the minority here, but I prefer endnotes with spiffy little superscript numbers that, in ebooks, function as hyperlinks; I'm perfectly willing to navigate away from the page when I want to know something's source. that attending to death deepens one’s understanding of its mystery and, by extension, the mystery of life. Inspired by her own childhood fascination with the subject, she meets embalmers and a former death row executioner, mass fatality investigators and a bereavement midwife. Campbell weaves judicious reflections on the philosophy and history of the death industry into the reportage.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. But Lily, being a mere caretaker’s daughter, does not know that this is incorrect, and would describe herself as ‘literally run off my feet’. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with people who see death every day, she asks: Does seeing death change you as a person? It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. He is humbled by this realisation, which amounts to his own epiphany: an awareness that takes him outside of his own thoughts and self-absorption and makes him view his wife, and by extension, all of humanity in a new way.