Why we're thinking about death in the wrong way
telegraph.co.ukby the gates of the cemetery,’ she says. ‘Sorry to sound like Morrissey.’ She is a regular here and a striking presence – 6ft 1in, long hair, black clothes, stylish, funny and abnormally cheerful.We walk among the dead, among the hellebores and the yew trees, the ivy and the oak, a smattering of snowdrops and crocuses pushing their way into the world here and there.
Past the gravestones that refer to people ‘resting in peace’, ‘passing away’, ‘falling asleep’ – all except the artist Patrick Caulfield’s, which simply says ‘DEAD’.Campbell hates these euphemisms. ‘All the bullshit – I just think there is so much room in a euphemism for the imagination to take hold and it’s worse than just stating things plainly.
People talk about sex and death being the ultimate taboos, but in school we had classes about sex, and nothing at all about death – unless you count religion, which I don’t.‘You cannot skirt around the undeniable fact that one day we will be dead bodies.
There has to be a way of explaining what happens.’ In her new book All the Living and the Dead, she interviews morticians, embalmers, funeral directors and pathology technicians.
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