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Why we fear dead bodies It's easier to forget that corpses are human

Death matters. Credit: Andres Gutierrez/Anadolu/Getty

Death matters. Credit: Andres Gutierrez/Anadolu/Getty


April 4, 2022   5 mins

It is almost exactly two years ago that we were first asked to stand on our doorsteps to clap for NHS staff. As the weeks went on, the target of our applause was widened: to healthcare workers and emergency services, the Clap for Our Carers website added: “armed services, delivery drivers, shop workers, teachers, waste collectors, manufacturers, postal workers, cleaners, vets, engineers … bravo you are amazing!”

A funeral director friend — a woman whose job depends on not becoming too emotional — was livid at the omission. Clap for Our Carers celebrated “all those who are out there making an unbelievable difference to our lives in these challenging times”. Meanwhile, those making an unbelievable difference to our deaths were ignored, even though their times were just as challenging, if not more so.

It was not so much the case numbers — one of Amanda’s biggest grumbles was constantly tripping over the coffins she panic-bought in March, didn’t use, and had to store in the staff kitchen — but the ludicrous Covid theatre she had to choreograph. Instead of meeting families for tea and sympathy, she was giving advice over Zoom on strategies for deciding which ten people would make the cut, and whether these ten were allowed to place a rose on the coffin individually so long as they were socially distanced. And then, after she gave the correct answer — “No, but do it anyway” — there was the tedium of fighting with crematorium staff threatening to blacklist her.

Funeral directors weren’t even on the Government’s list of Key Workers when it was first introduced. Those who deal with the dead were forgotten, even when the shadow of death was over the whole country. It was not deliberate suppression of the facts, like the mobile crematoria rumoured to be following the Russian front line to keep reality at a distance from people back home; it simply never occurred to the authorities to think about who and what comes after death.

Someone who does think about the who and what is Hayley Campbell. Her new book, All the Living and the Dead, is a series of profiles of “death workers” — not just funeral directors, but embalmers, grave diggers, anatomists and, in one haunting chapter, an executioner. There is a huge emphasis on the physical: her chapter on the work of funeral directors is about the act of changing the clothes on a body, not the counselling or event organising (“all the work of a wedding planner but done in a week”) or the constant state of war with crematorium staff — the work that takes up most of a funeral director’s time. Funeral celebrants are not mentioned at all.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a range of people from the funeral industry; and one of my standard questions was “What is a funeral for?” (The other one was “Who is a funeral for?”) It wasn’t until the very last interview that someone said, “to dispose of the body”, and I realised that everyone had been skipping over the one thing that defines a funeral, like those restaurant reviewers who never mention the food. The whole point of a funeral is that it gets the body where it needs to be — a physical presence that we can cope with, buried or processed into ash.

Campbell doesn’t make that mistake. She has a whole chapter about what happens in crematoria. The part that will stay with me longest — possibly because both my parents died of cancer — is that a tumour takes longer to turn to ash than the rest of the body, unyielding while everything else is burnt away, like St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz. The operator has to fire jets directly at the lump — “almost like black coral” — until it too is dust.

Still, the book doesn’t talk about what happens to the ashes after they’ve gone through the cremulator and become powder. It is as if Campbell loses interest in human remains at the moment most of us can face up to them: when they are no longer recognisable as a body. She interviews a specialist in the niche and rather creepy art of death masks — “Nick thought that the popularity of death masks was on the rise… But it never really took off” — but doesn’t examine the growing industry surrounding ashes that have been safely unbodied.

There is no mention of the companies that will send them into the heavens in fireworks; or turn them into diamonds, pencils, vinyl records or tattoos; or pour them into hourglasses (“They cannot be exactly timed, due to the consistency of the cremains”); or mix them with concrete to create habitats for fish in coral reefs; or of the company in Alabama which will place them “with care and reverence into almost any caliber or gauge of ammunition”. Or, if you want niche and rather creepy, vibrators.

There is money in achieving the impossible — giving you a physical reminder of someone that isn’t a physical reminder of them. Perhaps the reason death masks never took off was that they are too good a reminder. Although it is worth noting that one high-profile British politician did commission one of his late father: Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It was different when ours was a Christian society, but we now find it difficult to admit that our bodies are what we are. The most popular reading at funerals is now the dreadful “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, which suggests that the deceased is wind or sunlight or glints in snow — anything but the body being buried. It’s a bit of doggerel so mawkish and vacuous that Ricky Gervais used it as the emotional climax to his telly show about death. The first time I laughed after my mother’s death was when a priest, to whom I had sarcastically suggested it as a reading, read it all the way to “I am not here / I did not die,” the final lines, before handing it back and saying, “Well, the crematorium’s going to be a hell of a shock, isn’t it?”

Campbell, though, doesn’t shy away from the physicality of dead bodies — the smell of putrefaction, and why it smells like a gas leak; the sound of rigor snapping — and how they are physically handled. In many ways, emphasising the physicality is healthier than ignoring it: in a disaster, Campbell points out, those who actively do something are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised, as they are using their stress hormones for their proper purpose, than those who stand by. (On a smaller scale, it was felt deeply by my cousins that they were not allowed to carry my uncle’s coffin at his funeral, because of the social distancing rules, which everyone knew would be totally ignored at the subsequent wake.)

But, in a post-Christian society, it’s just as easy to ignore the fact we are not just our bodies. Most of the death workers Campbell interviews do this to a certain extent because they need to separate these bodies from their identities — technicians in the autopsy room who can weigh organs so long as they know nothing about the person whose body it is; crematorium workers who can pitch someone into a fire but find dressing them too personal.

The executioner is the only death worker in the book who knew the bodies in his charge equally well when they were alive — execution was among his duties as a prison guard. He is also the only one who believes in God. This is not a coincidence. Campbell dismisses this as wishful thinking: “God is the soft focus everyone [involved in an execution] puts on the scene… to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter.” To me, it says something very different. He believes because he knows that death does matter. It is the rest of us who are looking in soft focus.


Andrew Watts was a comedian for 12 years, during which time he performed in the UK, Ireland, Europe and New Zealand.

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Jason Highley
Jason Highley
2 years ago

That last paragraph really hits home. When my son died, and we had his funeral, first there was the litany of people who were helping plan the occasion in our grief. Most insisted it was not in fact a funeral, but a “celebration of life”. Nonsense. My son lived for only months. To focus on anything else but what Jesus accomplished for him on the cross would be to COMPLETELY distill his short life’s meaning down to only those months. Contrary to anyone who insisted was I “just doing what brings me comfort”, I had put a LOT of thought into the religious significance of his death. More than anyone else in that funeral service, I’d wager. Increasingly, in life as well as death, I see Christians as the only ones truly willing to stare confidently into the abyss and ask the hard question with clear eyes.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  Jason Highley

I appreciate your thoughts, but I would say religious people are among those who LEAST accept the reality of death. A young baby who dies maybe doesn’t have a great deal of individual character, but I think one of the best recent cultural innovations is putting remembrance of the dead person front and centre of the funeral service. I have been involved and read at two humanist funerals which everyone appreciated. If you think some sort of intervention is needed to ensure the ‘soul’ (which doesn’t exist) of the deceased goes to Heaven, you will no doubt prioritise holding an impersonal, purely religious service, but most of us are not believers and this doesn’t apply.

We find it psychologically difficult to contemplate our deaths, which we are aware of but can easy deny on some level, and this puts us apart from any animal. This helps to explain the invention (ok, not conscious but nonetheless human created / evolved) religious idea of ‘eternal life’. It is also vanishingly unlikely that Christians have got this right, but everyone else plain wrong. ( I would say ‘unfortunately’ but I don’t regard the decline in literal Christian belief as a tragedy).

And on a banal level, doesn’t our possible future existence in a Heaven in anything like a form recognisable as our current beings, sound indescribably boring?! If we can’t BE bored, or experience the usual panoply of human emotions in Heaven, then it what meaningful way can it be said that we live on?

We don’t spend our time worrying about what happened BEFORE we were born, so we should not fear the – sorry – absolute extinction AFTER our death; that is the way to look at it. We remember fondly our loved ones and friends, but everyone gets personally forgotten in rather a short period of time, as any stroll round a graveyard will show.

Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Peter McLaughlin
Peter McLaughlin
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Many people believe they will find oblivion unbearable.

Michael K
Michael K
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Spoken like a true atheist. Most of the proud atheists I met have used the exact same strategy as you do, namely arguing in a supposedly neutral, logical and humane manner, but at the same time flat-out denying the existence of a soul or mentioning the “absolute fact” that nothing happens after death.
So you believe in nothing. Ok, we got that. No need to be proud of it though, I for one have never heard of anything great being achieved due to a lack of faith.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Yes indeed what is all the fuss about?
We’ve had enough practice. Every night when we close our eyes there is no certainty that we will ever open them again, and one day we won’t.

Adriana L
Adriana L
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Excellent and brave reply, given the readership.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

If heaven is perfect it cannot be boring! You are right that many people are quickly forgotten, dwelling on those who have died would benefit neither those who have died or those who live on.
It might be worth your looking at Pascal’s wager!

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
2 years ago
Reply to  Jason Highley

One of my daughters died as a baby without leaving the hospital. The religious significance of the funeral meant a lot to me. However, it was nearly two years later when I was reminded of David’s grief for his son while he was ill that ended when his son died, that I fully realised that she was in heaven.
I agree that this give us the confidence to stare death in the face.

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

I will never forgive those that brought in the bad law that stopped me and my father from carrying my gran’s coffin and forced us to leave her body alone in essentially an empty tent, to be dealt with out of sight like a victim of some medieval siege. The ritual of the funeral has been thrown to the wolves.

William Murphy
William Murphy
2 years ago

It takes a comedian to get really serious about death. But Barry Albin-Dyer’s wonderful book “Don’t drop the coffin” combines wickedly funny anecdotes about the funeral business with desperately sad and moving stories. Barry notes the three aspects of the modern way of handling a corpse – preservation, protection (against disease) and presentation. As one embalmer noted, his careful work gets buried or burnt in a few days. But that view of the body is someone’s last image of their loved one and will probably stay with them for ever.

A staff member at the new Cheltenham Crematorium told me about that aspect of tumours needing extra cremation. Also expensive metal inserts such as artificial hips can be recycled. Cheltenham is probably stuck with both its old and new crematoria as the now disused funeral Chapel in the same cemetery is such a fine example of its kind.

A more mundane consequence of rising fuel prices. In 2010 I went to a rare open day at our local crematorium and learned that their gas bill was £50,000 a year. God knows what it is going to be now. Barry noted the supreme idiocy and inhumanity of someone objecting to putting a child’s teddy bear in the coffin – it might create extra pollution when cremated. Oddly I have not yet seen anyone objecting to cremation as it might add to global warming. But I am sure that is coming.

Clive Mitchell
Clive Mitchell
2 years ago

A vibrator! Really, this actually happens? So this is what happens when society becomes “post Christian”.

Andrew D
Andrew D
2 years ago
Reply to  Clive Mitchell

An atheist spin on ‘I will come again’?

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago

A tale from the Raj: Some years ago the Indian authorities released a large number of ‘flesh eating’ turtles into the River Ganges to consume the plethora of partly scorched bodies that were polluting the place.
Unfortunately, it now appears this was not a howling success, as the ‘locals’ soon discovered that the Turtles were quite tasty, and quickly killed and ate most of them. I gather they are now looking for a less tasty carnivore.

Last edited 2 years ago by ARNAUD ALMARIC
Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
2 years ago

Cremulator? Come on. Surely not.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Better known as the “crusher”. Many a Golf green is strewn with its handiwork.