NewPhilosopherthe day it has been a particularly har-
rowing day, you have someone you can
converse with who understands. And
that’s important and very different
from talking to somebody who per-
haps is brought in as a counsellor, who
is trying to find out how you feel about
things and to help you talk through it.
These people who are on a team with
you experience it at the same time and
that is a different kind of bond that
does help you get through what can be
some incredibly challenging times. So
it is about the team, and the impor-
tance of the team should never ever be
underestimated.Your preparation for dealing with
this type of event started quite early. As a
teenager you worked in a butcher’s shop –
a different type of team you had there and
different bodies you were dealing with –
then you studied biology, and ultimately
became a forensic anthropologist. It’s not
exactly a well-worn path for teenagers –
do you recall what prompted your fasci-
nation with anatomy and death?
I had the most unusual grand-
mother. My grandmother came from
a very small hamlet on the west coast
of Scotland called Glenelg – she, be-
ing a west coast Scot, had a fascina-
tion with what she always called “the
other side of life”, the spirit side of
life; they were a very superstitious
group. And my grandmother always
had the view that every single day
of your life the friend that walks
alongside you is death – that it was
the other side of the same coin. My
grandmother made death her friend
and she always talked about death as
her friend, and she was the singularly
most important person to me grow-
ing up. My grandmother and I would
have these great conversations about
death and what it meant to live and
what it meant to die and what there
was beyond death. That initial taboo as
a child was never there for me because
she was the kind of person who talkedwe know it’s unreliable, and we had
to get the infrastructure in place that
allowed us to get refrigeration on site
because we needed to halt the process
of decomposition, and those were the
first two things we were able to do on
the ground.
The scale of the disaster was unprec-
edented. In your work you are usually
dealing with one or two individuals
who have died, but in this instance you
were dealing with thousands of people.
How do you deal with this sort of situa-
tion, how do you deal with a disaster of
this scale from an emotional and psycho-
logical standpoint?
In Kosovo, we were dealing with
mass burials and we were dealing with
mass execution sites. So although the
scale was large [in Thailand], we had
previously worked with large-scale in-
vestigations – under different circum-
stances because they were under war-
crime circumstances, but they were still
bodies in varying stages of advanced de-
composition and varying difficulties in
terms of identification of the deceased.
When we were in Kosovo we also
had to deal with families and with vil-
lagers who were friends and acquaint-
ances of the dead. So Thailand wasn’t
the first exposure to that – Kosovo was.
And Kosovo for us therefore was a lit-
tle bit of a training ground in terms of
being prepared for what we might en-
counter in Thailand, but we also know
that every mass fatality event is differ-
ent – there are always different factors
that come into play, whether it be po-
litical, whether it be security, whether
it be climate, whether it be availability
of identifying features from records,
everything single one is different. But
you’re not doing it in isolation; you’re
doing it as a member of a team and
within that team you have a specific
role to play, but you’re not doing it on
your own. We know the importance of
having a team around you, a team that
you can talk to – so if at the end of
The other side of life