All the Living and the Dead

Hayley Campbell, a journalist, grew up surrounded by images of death. As a child in Brisbane, Australia, she watched her father, comic book artist Eddie Campbell, illustrate From Hell, a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, studying autopsy photographs pinned to his drawing board with fascination rather than fear. She buried dead cats in dawn ceremonies, encountered decomposing birds that rendered whole streets impassable on her walk to school, and at seven created her own felt-tip compendium of violent deaths. When her friend Harriet drowned at age 12, Campbell stared at the closed coffin during the funeral, frustrated by her inability to see the body. At her Catholic school, she questioned a priest's claim that a red light was powered by God when she could see the extension cord, and from that point regarded organized religion with suspicion. These experiences planted a question that grew into a professional obsession: What does real death look like, and what happens to the people who handle it every day?

Campbell's investigation began at a talk by Poppy Mardall, an independent funeral director in south London who argued that the first dead body a person sees should not be someone they love. Poppy, a former Sotheby's employee who entered the funeral industry after both her parents received cancer diagnoses, invited Campbell to help prepare a body for cremation. In a sunlit mortuary within Lambeth Cemetery, Campbell held the cold hands of a man called Adam, helped dress him in his family's chosen clothes, and threaded his belt through the loops. His body showed the colors of decomposition, yet his casual clothing hinted at a personality. The experience left Campbell with a heightened awareness of being alive.

She traveled to Rochester, Minnesota, to meet Terry Regnier, director of anatomical services at the Mayo Clinic, who had managed its body donation program for 21 years. Campbell toured freezers holding the parts of an estimated 130 donors, finding that severed hands retained personality through polished or bitten nails but that the scene provoked unexpected emotional silence, which she attributed to the donors' voluntary choice. Terry described how surgeons practiced a landmark face transplant using donated cadavers. After each practice session, he stayed behind to swap the faces back so each donor would be cremated with their own features, an act no one would have noticed if he had skipped it.

In London, Campbell met Nick Reynolds, the UK's only commercial death mask sculptor, a harmonica player in the band Alabama 3 and son of Great Train Robbery mastermind Bruce Reynolds. Nick cast four or five dead faces a year, viewing the work as a calling. He recounted casting the still-warm face of John Joe Amador, a man he believed was wrongly executed in Texas, and acknowledged that his constant busyness might be a way of avoiding the weight of what he had seen.

Campbell visited Kenyon, a disaster response company near Heathrow Airport that has managed mass fatalities for over a century. Mark "Mo" Oliver, Kenyon's VP of operations and a former police officer, walked her through his work on the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and multiple plane crashes. He showed her a warehouse holding approximately 750,000 personal items recovered from Grenfell Tower, the London apartment building where 72 people died in a 2017 fire. Mo argued that the presence of a body, even in fragments, provides essential markers for grief, and that families handle grim truth far better than an inadequate response.

In California, Campbell met Neal Smither, founder of Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., who had cleaned death scenes for 22 years after being inspired by a scene in Pulp Fiction. He posted graphic before-and-after images to nearly half a million Instagram followers. Campbell reflects on her teenage encounters with Rotten.com, a now-defunct website of graphic death imagery, and traces how repeated exposure creates numbness rather than understanding. After two decades, Neal admitted he had lost all sympathy for clients and was counting down the days to retirement, though he confessed he was afraid of death.

Campbell's most complex encounter was with Jerry Givens, Virginia's former state executioner, who carried out 62 executions by electric chair and lethal injection. She found him mentoring students at a high-school basketball game. Jerry kept his role secret from his wife for 17 years and constructed an elaborate coping framework: He insisted the condemned committed "suicide" through their criminal choices and that God placed him in his role. Campbell notes contradictions in his account. Two events shook his faith in the system: the near-execution of Earl Washington Jr., a man with an intellectual disability later exonerated by DNA, and Jerry's own imprisonment for perjury and money laundering. He became a vocal opponent of the death penalty, arguing it inflicts lasting psychological damage on execution staff. Jerry died of Covid-19 in April 2020; Virginia abolished the death penalty less than a year later.

Campbell investigates embalming through three perspectives. Ron Troyer, a retired Wisconsin funeral director who embalmed both his own parents, challenged her characterization of embalming as violent, calling it an act of compassion. Dr. Philip Gore, whose family has been in the funeral industry since 1831, argued that with declining religious belief, the physical body has become more significant in grieving. Embalmer Kevin Sinclair showed Campbell the full process: sewing the jaw shut, injecting fluid through the carotid arteries, aspirating blood from the heart. Over 40 minutes, a shrunken, jaundiced man's face became plump and pink, and Campbell realized he was in his forties, not the seventies she had assumed.

The turning point of Campbell's journey occurred at St Thomas' Hospital, where she observed autopsies with Lara-Rose Iredale, an anatomical pathology technologist (APT). She held a human brain, watched organs weighed, and managed it all with composure. But when a two-week-old baby was washed in a small blue tub after his post-mortem and began to sink below the waterline while the technologist stepped away, Campbell froze, suppressing every instinct to reach for him. On the autopsy table, the baby had been pure science; in the bathtub, he became a familiar domestic scene "infected by death" (170). Campbell spent three weeks in bed afterward.

This experience led her to Clare Beesley, head bereavement midwife at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, who supports families through baby loss. Clare described easing terrified families into seeing their child gradually, through photographs, blankets with feet peeking out, and honest preparation. She showed Campbell tiny wooden coffins for the smallest losses and memory boxes that can be stored unopened for years until parents are ready. Campbell connects the image of an orca pushing her dead calf through the ocean for 10 days to the unshareable nature of baby loss.

Campbell observed gravediggers Mike and Bob at Arnos Vale, a Victorian cemetery in Bristol, where both men had already dug and stood inside their own graves, which will one day hold them above their mothers. She watched crematorium operator Tony Bryant charge a coffin into a furnace with one arm and learned that cancer tumors are sometimes the last thing to burn. She visited the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, where bodies are stored head-down in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius in the hope of future revival, and found not delusion but qualified optimism and genuine empathy.

In a final interview, retired detective Anthony Mattick warned Campbell that the images she had accumulated would never fully leave her but that the experience would make her more perceptive and appreciative of life. Campbell reflects that no single death worker sees the whole of death; the system functions because each person focuses on their specific role. She connects her journey to the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that death tolls reported as numbers on screens remained incomprehensible because death was already treated as invisible. She concludes that shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death denies us a deeper understanding of who we are, and that the unseen acts of care performed by death workers reveal not cold detachment but something closer to love.