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

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Charlotte’s response is simple: even if there are ghosts, our responsibility is to our marriage, our workers, the baby that is growing inside her. Campbell is a sharp and witty observer who successfully conveys her own fascination with the subject. She doesn't leave much room for people to deal with death and grief in ways that differ from her or the possibility that truth can come from illusion, not just a rotting corpse.

She said that she wished she could bring schoolchildren to her mortuary to confront death before they have to. A less delightful thing that somewhat tarnished my reading experience, and is the source of the missing half-star on the rating about, was the lived experience of her tragic loss of a baby.I didn’t think she’d actually say yes, let alone invite me to be involved in someone’s funeral preparation. She says that she has been fascinated by death since she was little, and this book feels like her own exploration of death and her emotions surrounding it, rather than a look into "the people who have made death their life's work. 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. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Through Campbell’s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? There was only one section I didn't enjoy and ended up skimming, cryonics, freezing corpses in the hope of technology one day being able to revive them back into life. 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. Charlotte Appleby is his vivacious, independent wife, herself something of a pioneer as a leading society photographer in London. Poppy hadn’t processed it herself until both of her parents got cancer diagnoses in quick succession.

He told me that when Bentham was alive he used to keep his future glass eyeballs in his pocket, getting them out at parties for a laugh.

The writing is finely felt and full of life, Campbell always finding a way to look through horror, to see humanity. Campbell describes the mechanics of these jobs in comprehensive detail and with a measured levity that keeps the dour stench of death from overwhelming the pages . What sort of man did he become that people are trying to reach back through time and threaten him and his family? 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. One of the effects of this, of course, is that it becomes difficult to know when a particular word or phrase should be heard in the narrator’s voice or in the ‘voice’ of one of the characters.I have read books before that talk about funeral directors, embalmers, and people who preform cremations. Well, the author admits that she has--and has always had--an interest in death, particularly its more morbid effects. 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. I wondered what I would be like now, if I had met her as a child and she had shown me what I had wanted to see.

A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights .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.