Teaches us about the living
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.