What working with the dead teaches us about the living
Here’s a book about death, everyone’s favourite subject. Will we die tomorrow, in an appalling car crash? Or will we go on for several more decades, creaking, greying and slowly crumbling into dust?
Personally I plan to go on forever, but then I am what one of my friends calls a ‘denial monkey’. It’s probably for people like me that this book is most useful.
sue Black is one of the world’s leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists. Death is her trade, and has been ever since her teenage years, when she had a saturday job in a butcher’s shop.
‘I loved the clinical precision involved in the butcher’s craft . . . I learned not to bite my fingernails, never to place a knife on the block with the blade facing upwards and that blunt knives cause more accidents than sharp ones.’
It’s probably fair to say there’s slightly more blood and gore in this book than in most about science.
Black distinguishes between forensic pathology and her own rather lesserknown career. ‘Forensic pathology seeks evidence of a cause and manner of death — the end of the journey — whereas forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led, the journey itself, across the full span of its duration,’ she writes.
This makes her, one might think, uniquely positioned to write a book as farranging as this one.
It is the work not of a professional writer, but of a highly gifted amateur who has a fascinating story to tell. However, Black has a second intention, and that is to demystify death altogether.
‘We talk about “losing” someone, whisper of their “passing” and, in sombre, respectful tones, we commiserate with others when a loved one has “gone”.
‘I didn’t “lose” my father — I know exactly where he is. He is buried at the top of Tomnahurich Cemetery in Inverness in a lovely wooden box provided by Bill Fraser, the family funeral director, of which he might have approved, although he would have probably thought it too expensive.’
As you can see, she has a lovely, strong and nimble voice, and if her prose style does occasionally slip into the mundane, you always forgive her.
Very roughly, the book’s first half is about her life — the first time she had to dissect a human corpse, the deaths of her parents, her brief (and by all accounts painful) television career.
The second half is about the things she PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED BY PRESSREADER PressReader.com +1 604 278 4604 ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY
has seen and done in her job and what she has learned.
She constantly takes you by surprise with strange and unexpected thoughts. ‘What makes us human?’ she asks at one point. ‘ One of my favourite definitions is: “Humans belong to the groups of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar-system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.” ’
She goes on: ‘ It is strangely comforting to be granted tacit permission to make mistakes just because we are human.’ I love that.
As you’d expect, Black takes no prisoners. ‘ The stark truth is that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn’t something we “get over”, and it doesn’t necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface.’ This seems to me a wonderfully straightforward description of something horribly complex, and also absolutely true. As it happens, I have reached an age where my friends and relatives have started dropping like flies, and I seem to be almost permanently on my way to a funeral or on my way back from one. Black is a refreshingly clear-eyed guide through all this. Not entirely surprisingly, she has a great collection of mourning jewellery and she loves a good graveyard. Slightly more surprisingly, she is terrified of rats and all rodents, and is far too squeamish to consider getting a tattoo.
As someone more than averagely squeamish myself, I was a little nervous about reading this book, and it’s true there are several passages you won’t want to read on a full stomach. Black describes in breakfast-challenging detail her experiences in Kosovo, where she served several tours of duty.
Her job was to enter the scenes of some terrible massacres and sift through evidence (often literally) to prepare for international war crimes cases that would inevitably ensue.
The mental control you would need to do this job must be intense, but Black seems to be an expert at compartmentalising the horrors. In short, she sleeps at night.
The book’s overall effect, though, is to make you less fearful about death — which can only be a good thing.