Category: Booka

When I think of people who work with the dead, I think of people who work in funeral homes, including funeral directors and embalmers, police detectives and that’s about it. However, in her entertaining book All the Living and the Dead, Haley Campbell identified several more professions that work with the dead, including crime scene cleaner and death mask sculptor. She did, however, skip the death scene investigator.

Campbell explains that she became fascinated with death when her cartoonist father was working on a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. Campbell started doing drawings of her own and was fascinated by not on the the fact that someone could be alive one moment and dead the next, but also by what physically happened to a body when it died.

All the Living and the Dead, follows Campbell as she seeks to better understand death and those that work with it. Her first interview with a death worker is when she visits Poppy’s funeral home in London and gets to assist in preparing a body for a viewing. She also learns about bodies donated to scene when she visits with Terry, who runs the Anatomical Services lab at the Mayo Clinic in MN. He is responsible for taking care of the bodies and making sure they are respected. Part of his role is dissecting bodies prior to classes so that if medical students are studying hips, that is what they see. However, although parts of his job are gruesome and bloody, Terry always makes sure to maintain his patients humanity such as the time after doctors were practicing face transplants, he made sure that the faces were swapped back so that every person left his morgue for cremation or burial with the correct face.

Another death related career that Campbell explored was disaster victim identification. She interviewed Mark Oliver from Kenyon whose job it was to assemble teams to fly to disaster sites at a moment’s notice to help with identifying the dead. The company also helped with the softer side of disaster recovery, including fielding questions from the media and making arrangements for family members to fly to disaster sites. Kenyon has considered things that few people think about when preparing for disasters, such as not serving barbecued meat at a fire site. Their warehouses are packed with gear designed to retrieve and identify human remains to help grieving families.

It was not the overwhelming gruesomeness of disaster recovery or even crime scene cleaning that most impacted Campbell, it was when she was observing an Anatomical Pathology Technician do an autopsy on a baby and when the baby was being washed it slipped beneath the water and even though it was already dead, Campbell felt as if she was watching the child drown. That moment more than anything seemed to make the fragility of life and the finality of death real for Campbell, and it led her to seek out a death worker who hadn’t been on her original list: a bereavement midwife.

Bereavement midwife’s help mothers whose children are stillborn or who die shortly after birth. If it is known that a child will not survive, they are taken to a special wing at Heartland Hospital in Birmingham so they will not be exposed to the happiness and joy that normally accompanies a child’s birth. The special Eden Ward at Heartland caters to parents who will not go home with a child. The specially trained midwifes are there to help parents with their loss by providing tiny caskets and by doing what they can to memorializing these tiny lives.

As a thanatologist, I seek out a lot of books on death, but this book was an impulse read that I’m really glad I read. Most of it is upbeat and provides a sense of how carrying people who work with the dead–and their living loved ones–really are.

True crime aficionados know that medical examiners, like the late great Dr. Donald Mallard (Ducky) on NCIS, talk to the dead and the dead talk back. It is not unusual when watching an episode of NCIS to hear Ducky, or his successor, holding a one-sided conversation with the corpse on the table. These conversations include laments about the deceased’s death as well as questions about what killed them. These conversations serve as a way to advance the plot and also show that the MEs have not forgotten the humanity of the corpse.

Although the conversation with corpses is minimal in What the Dead Know, Butcher does help the living understand what can be learned from corpses and crime scenes. Butcher spent 23 years as a New York City Death Investigator. She was not responsible for autopsying the dead, but was responsible for visiting death scenes around the city to photograph and gather evidence. Her clients included the elderly who died alone in one bedroom apartments, murder victims in alleys, and the desperate who die by suicide.

She opens with the story of a man who died by hanging, but who intended to electrocute whoever cut him down. He had unscrewed all the light bulbs and set it up to look as if the power was out in his apartment. However, he plugged in a power cord and used that to hang himself. If Butcher had not had a torn tendon and been unable to cut him down, she would have been electrocuted. She caught it through reviewing photos and was able to alert the morgue techs who did cut him down. Other stories include stories of men who died in flophouses and women who died in multimillion dollar townhouses.

Butcher was on sick leave on 09/11/2001 and like many of us she turned on her TV after someone called to tell her that something was going on in New York. She watched the tower’s fall from the perspective of a death scene investigator. As she watched, she thought about all the people who might have died, wondered how they would find their bodies, and how they would be identified. She was able to enter the city on 09/12 and she tells the tale of an insider who helped identify the bodies, helped coordinate resources, and was there in the aching aftermath when all that helpers could do was identify bodies and console the living.

Although the title of the book is What the Dead Know, this book is not only about what the dead can teach us about life in general, it is also about what happens to a person when they live in a world of death and destruction, when they spend 8 hours or more every day looking at dead people. Butcher is an alcoholic and she suffered a breakdown that led her to lose her first career and led her to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. She loved her job and did it well for 23 years, but when she was forced out, all the pain and ugliness she had absorbed for 23 years demanded to be let out. Butcher sought help at an in-patient facility and worked to regain her mental health. When she came out, she was more in touch with her feelings and ready for her next career as an author and an actor.

What the Dead Know provides a fascinating look at the world of death investigations and what goes on behind the scenes, but it is also a very human book about the dangers of keeping all our pain bottled up.