Book Review: All the Living and the Dead, Hayley Campbell, narr. by the author

[juushika]

Title: All the Living and the Dead
Author: Hayley Campbell
Narrator: Hayley Campbell
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2022
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 524,300
Text Number: 1906
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I'm of two minds on this one. I read a lot about death work, as one does. Campbell's pool of subjects is broad, but the category is broader; some of her picks feel chosen for novelty more than representation, but some (specifically bereavement midwives) were genuinely new to me and captivating. Campbell structures the book chronologically in order to explore her own changing relationship with death through the course of her research; and she turns an open mind to a diversity of experiences and, fundamentally, coping mechanisms. All good. And all flawed, as the personal anecdotes are overbearing but sympathetic, and the human interest focus is unreliably applied, hypercritical one moment, complacent the next (the section on the Mayo Clinic filled me with concern and then rage, as Campbell blithely agrees, yes, fatphobia is probably a good and necessary training tool for medical professionals!). I read about death work for much the same reason Campbell was compelled to write about it, so of course I enjoyed this: many morbid curiosities answered, complicated relationships with death given compassionate room, good stuff, my jam; but, occasionally, frustrating.

Months later I take a chance and see if the name I heard in the prep room would bring up an obituary on the internet. There, beside it, is a photo uploaded by someone who did love him. He's tall and fit, smiling. I wondered when his family had last seen him, if they watched him shrink in life. I cannot imagine knowing the man in the photo and seeing him as he was in the mortuary, when I first met him. He was a different person—a body, destroyed from the inside out. He looks better embalmed, this is undeniable. But I'm still not sure if I buy the psychological purpose of injecting chemicals into a dead body for cosmetic purposes: surely seeing the evidence of what he endured at the end of his life is not only part of his story, but part of you process of understanding and grieving?

My issues with embalming are all theoretical, impersonal; I was overeducated re: my options, orchestrated with the funeral home for minimally invasive (eyes, jaw) body preparation in advance of a viewing, and for a simple cremation, and was never upsold/pressured to consider other options; and the above was not my primary motivating factor (waste and ecological impact and my father's requests were), but it was the explicit subtext, always, to not make his body anything other than it had been: the proof of his death, his illness and death, which devastated us. At the viewing my uncle mentioned sitting shiva, that it felt strange not to, although my father's family was not practicing; and my mother (not Jewish) said, we had, for weeks, months, as he died. I would not erase the proof of that.

Comments

[lokifan]

At the viewing my uncle mentioned sitting shiva, that it felt strange not to, although my father's family was not practicing; and my mother (not Jewish) said, we had, for weeks, months, as he died. I would not erase the proof of that.

That really struck me.

[juushika]

Thank you. Which feels like the wrong wording re: the subject matter, but I don't know how else to phrase it; I guess something like: death & grief is difficult to articulate, so to know any of it was articulated meaningfully means a lot to me.