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

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Nathan moves from the kind, loving, slightly reserved scientist of those sparkling early days to a driven, dark man struggling for his very soul. For as he investigates what seem to be arbitrary hauntings, he discovers a link between all of them, and that link is... Nathan Appleby. The Living and the Dead production was based in the Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol, England. [16] The primary filming location was Horton Court in Gloucestershire. [17] Interesting was the special maternity unit for women who were going to deliver a dead baby or one who would die soon after birth. A quiet, calm place, where there were no screams of pain from women in unmedicated labour. There are cooling cots so that the baby can remain with the parents until they are ready to let the baby be buried. And midwives who dedicate themselves to delivering only dead babies in sadness, although they train to deliver in joy, one of the few medical procedures that is generally joyous. Special women, very compassionate and empathetic. This realisation arrived in the maelstrom of her crisis about her job. Conversations long ignored were now being had. When it was clear that both of her parents were going to survive, she saved some money, quit the art world and went to Ghana for a break. There she got typhoid and nearly died too.

As someone who used to work in end-of-life care, I have a lot of opinions about books centered around death and loss. I want everyone to have better understanding about this important topic and have high standards as a result. This is a really strong, well-written book but it could have been even stronger with a few changes. Two additional professions should have been profiled: a hospice nurse or CNA and someone who provides physician-assisted dying. I’m obviously biased toward the inclusion of hospice and palliative care but it’s a puzzling omission regardless. Hospice provides a unique form of support throughout the dying process and yet a lot of people have never heard of it or misunderstand what it means. As far as physician-assisted dying, it can be a dicey issue so I can understand why the author might not want to wade in those particular waters. At the same time, she chose to include the Cryonics Institute so it’s not as if she shied away anything that might raise eyebrows.The other side of that coin, however, was my discovery that there are certain souls, who if there is a god deserve a total and complete remission from their sins, who specialize in bereavement midwifery. How very, very beautiful a soul those people must possess. How vast their reserves of kindness and empathy must be. And how deeply glad I am that they do this job.

A benediction granted not from the altar of faith but the altar of life, where a man’s accumulated experience and misbegotten acts become the trapdoor that he opens to look inward, only to find that within there is the same thing as without: nothing. During a cremation, cancer is the last thing to burn, even sometimes remaining along with the bones. There is no good time to talk about death. Nobody wants to hear about death on a nice day, because it would spoil the mood, and nobody wants to talk about death when it is upon us because it’s too close, too insensitive, tonally off.Each chapter centers on an interview with one person. Understandable due to space constraints but I couldn’t help but wish we’d gotten to hear from a couple of people doing the same job in different places. City vs. country, for example. Or those who have different views about the work they do, which would have been especially helpful in the executioner chapter. The author is from the UK and the people profiled are primarily from the UK, with a few from the US. Because the countries have different regulations and standards, it might have been better to concentrate on one country or the other. The contrast was particularly evident in the chapter at the crematorium. 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.