This book is moving, funny, and liable to unexpectedly cause me to tear up. It's about the head and the heart of death, about who we are, and is filled with images and moments that will remain in my head until the end. A gentle book and, like death itself, an unexpectedly kind one.” —Neil Gaiman, New York Times bestselling author of Good Omens and Coraline 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. Just as Campbell felt weighed down by what she learned and experienced, I too began to feel heavy and had to set this book down for a few weeks before returning to it. The overuse of hyphens throughout the writing also slowed me down a little.

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? 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. Hayley approaches this dark subject with care, kindness and respect. Which I think is really important. Overall, this is such an informative read and I would recommend it to anybody who may be curious. Of course some of the descriptions may be graphic but they are also educational. I feel like a book like this is helpful for me to process my own grief, throughout my 27 years of life I have lost many family members. I know how it feels to have death stare you in the face, an almost never ending reminder of our mortality.

Reviews

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 careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.” — Kirkus (starred) This moment suggests a fleeting encounter with his own image as others see it, and, by extension, a momentary awareness that there are other people in the world living their own lives and negotiating their own heartbreak. The epiphany that follows at the end of the story is certainly more decisive, but its lasting significance nevertheless remains ambiguous: 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.

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. 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. Charlotte Spencer [2] as Charlotte Appleby, a pioneering photographer who accompanies her husband to try to turn the farm's fortunes aroundThe Telegraph Magazine : interview by Jessamy Calkin Why we're thinking about death in the wrong way: From pathology to disaster management, Hayley Campbell spent two years immersed in a field few people know about - here's what it taught her. The series was created by Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes co-creator Ashley Pharoah. Pharoah's creative partner Matthew Graham was initially attached to the series, but withdrew prior to its production to work on Childhood's End for SyFy. [14] The series is directed by Alice Troughton and Sam Donovan. [2] Casting [ edit ] 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. Death workers deserve to be recognized. I really hope this will help normalize the work they do, as well as help prepare people who may someday have need of their services.