New Philosopher – July 2019

toyouat anage-appropriatelevel.She

nevertalkeddowntoyou,shealways

talkedwithyou.Andmyfatherwas

a tremendous shot, so my job as a

younggirlwastobewithmy father

whenhewentoutshooting– andhe

wouldshootrabbitsandpigeonsand

deerandwhateverit may be,always

forthepot.Mymotherwassqueam-

ish,somy jobwas alwaysto gut,to

skin,topluck,whateverit was– from

anearlyageworkingwithbloodand

deadanimalswasperfectlynormal,as

wasthediscussion arounddying.So

my parents never shielded me from

death. The minute a family mem-

berdied it was alwaysthe question,

Doyouwanttogoandseethem?Just

because theperson has died doesn’t

meanthattheynolongerexist.They

existinyourheart,theyexistinyour

headandyoucanstilltalkwiththem

evenif it is toa corpsewheretheper-

son is no longer.So I think I grew

up inan environmentthat wasvery

healthy aroundits attitude to death

and also to thephysicalityof death,

sothatwhenI wenttouniversityto

NewPhilosopher

They exist in

your heart,

they exist in

your head and

you can still

talk with them

even if it is to

a corpse where

the person is

no longer.

study human anatomy it seemed very

logical because I had spent a lot of

time studying the anatomy of animals.

It was now the human, it was another

animal. It was an interesting animal

to study, but an anatomy department

gives you this incredible permission

to be able to study the human form in

a detail that very few people get the

opportunity to do.

Now your experience was not only

different from teenagers of your time,

but also different from that of teenagers

of today. Your grandmother spoke to you

about death, you had experience with the

death of animals, which was followed by

you working in a butcher’s shop. What is

the effect of the way teenagers are taught

to think – or rather not to think – about

death these days?

Well, I think there’s a huge range

out there. I’m a product of my grand-

mother and each of my three girls

had no difficulty walking into my dis-

secting room, or to talk about death,

or to be in the presence of their dead

grandmother or grandfather or any

members of family. I know that the

friends of my daughters thought it

was unusual – so therefore I can only

anticipate that our level of comfort

with death was somewhat unusual.

But I find that when talking with

their friends, they had no difficulty

once the door was open for them to

talk about it and I think that’s often

where we fall down: we don’t open the

door for the discussion. But once the

door is open, people do actually feel

quite comfortable to talk about death

and to talk about their views on it,

their hopes for it, their fears of it. The

door is there, it’s about opening the

door for discussion.

You were still a teenager when you

first entered a dissecting room, and in

your book All That Remains you write

about your first encounter with a dead

human as a student. Most of us don’t see

a dead body until later in life, and when

we do, it’s unlikely to be at such close

quarters. You write that “as a living per-

son, you remain separate from death, but

the mesmerising beauty of human anato-

my has created a bridge into the world of

the dead ”. Now, I can hear your grand-

mother speaking there – having death

alongside you – with that story, but how

did your experience in the dissecting room

alter your view of death, and of the dead?

It’s really interesting because I

think there are different categories

of the dead. There are those catego-

ries of the dead that are personal to

you – the death of a grandparent, the

death of a parent, and it is very differ-

ent when that death is not personal to

you. In the dissecting room, I think I

was about 19 when I first went into

a dissecting room, and you walk in

and know that the people who are in

there, the dead who are in there, gave

permission for you to do this. So they,

when they were alive, said: “I give you

my permission that you can dissect my

body and you can learn about human

anatomy from me.”

So, there is a gift there between

you and that dead person. And that

dead person, though, is very different

to the forensic dead person. The foren-

sic dead person hasn’t given you that

permission. Effectively, the authori-

ties are asking you to help interact

with this dead person for a particular

purpose. So that’s what I mean about

there being different categories of the

dead. For me, going into a dissecting

room where somebody had explicitly

given permission to do what you were

The other side of life