Hayley Campbell knows that, like everyone else, one day she will die, but she is not afraid. What “terrifies” him is knowing that he will lose the people he loves, but he knows that to process that “transcendental” moment, it is necessary to have a healthier relationship with death. And with the dead, of course. This is what she confesses to ABC in London, where the conversation, close to All Souls’ Day, revolves around a topic that continues to be a taboo in Western societies and which she has delved into in her book. ‘All the living and all the dead. People who have made death their job’, which was released in 2022 and is now published by Captain Swing in Spanish.
In it, the British journalist and writer explores our perception of deathand the impact it has on those who they work daily with her, such as a funeral director, a mourning midwife, embalmers, undertakers, a man whose job is to clean crime scenes and even a former executioner.
Campbell is clear about one of the reasons why we have a complicated relationship with an experience that sooner or later we will all experience closely. «In my book I talk about a woman I met in a sauna, who told me that she left her mother to die alone in the hospital because she did not want to be left with the image of her mother dying or dead. And for me, that sums it up, because if she didn’t have the fear of death or dead bodies, she wouldn’t have let her mother die alone,” he says. And it goes further: «The idea of dying alone is so sad… That someone be present at that moment it is immensely comforting», but «people are afraid of dying themselves, and maybe they believe that if they don’t think about it, it won’t happen. I think it’s crazy, and I don’t think it’s helpful, in fact, it causes harm, because that lack of thinking about death has practical effects on our lives and also on the people we love. “It’s so absurd.”
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Hayley Campbell
Captain Swing
And this is the case even though we are used to seeing death all the time: in movies, on TV news… But according to the writer, the screen makes that death “totally separate from us, it is very strange, even the images of Gaza we see now are horrible, but people still see it through a screen, so is still far away. It’s on the same screen you’re watching Netflix on,” says Campbell, adding that “even as everyone had to face death in a way we’ve never done before with the Covid pandemic, now we’re pretending that It didn’t really happen. And, again, everything is in line. It’s all that denial of death. There were parts of the pandemic where I thought, ‘Oh, maybe things could change. People are realizing how sad it is to be separated from the dying and the corpses. Maybe things will change’… But it’s back to normal. We had the opportunity to do things differently and we didn’t,” he denounces.
Precisely, the contact with corpses occupies an important part of his essay. In fact, he says that he “loves cultures that celebrate the dead person and are more involved with the corpse,” and not like in England, where, he says, “funerals are emotionless,” but “if you try to keep it closed the lid of a pot, things explode from the sides. “I’m not advocating that people do what they do in Indonesia, removing bodies from graves and dancing around them, but I do think we should be closer to the corpse.” Because death “isn’t just about managing to bury a body and then deal with a house full of stuff. You have your own emotions, which you have to deal with, and I think the corpse can play a very important role in that. And we are wasting by burying them immediately».
radical honesty
The bodies of the dead are hidden and their management is outsourced because we think it’s too much for us. “Each hour 6,324 people die in the world, which represents a total of 151,776 per day, and approximately 55.4 million per year. That’s more than if Australia’s entire population disappeared from the planet every six months. For most of those deaths in the Western world, a phone call will occur. “Someone with a stretcher will pick up the body and transport it to the mortuary.” In his opinion, people should at least have the option of approaching inert bodies, so dress our deadand this would help change this denial.
And furthermore, he adds, “I also believe that children should participate at funerals. And something I discovered when I was little was that, since I had questions and people didn’t give me complete answers, if you leave a void, a blank space, the children are going to fill it. If you don’t fill it with real information, they will fill it with what they have taken from movies or video games, from comics… It is what I did and it filled with horrors“, when instead “it could have been full of practical information like ‘this is what your dead friend looks like, and these are the people who dressed her, and this is what she was wearing in her coffin’ instead of all unreal images. “Children are going to fill that space themselves, so it’s best to tell them the truth.”
Campbell knows from personal experience that facing loss is not easy, but admits that “after this book, I am now in favor of radical honesty about these things. This idea that we don’t want to talk about death is false. People like it. “They just don’t know when to do it.” In your case, the book signings take hours because the attendees “talk to me about their own stories, they have to let off steam, but we hold back».
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