It’s late May, 2019. I’ve blown one deadline for this book and I’m about to miss another. I keep finding more people to speak to, more things I haven’t thought about. I’m still thinking about the baby; I’m having a hard time concentrating on anything else. But right now, I’m in a bar overlooking Saundersfoot Bay in South Wales, interviewing a former detective sergeant, Anthony Mattick, about his work on murder cases. We’re two pints in. I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my life, the kind of exhaustion where sleep does nothing. I remember a line in David Simon’s Homicide: ‘Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty.’ I figure Mattick is probably more tired than I am, but he doesn’t seem to be.
He wears sunglasses on his head, tucked up on top of his short grey hair, but never puts them on. He’s recently been in Spain for a joint fiftieth birthday party and is so sunburned he wouldn’t look out of place on the executioner’s plate at Red Lobster. Despite the view of the sunset over the sparkling sea, he’s managing to clear the balcony by loudly telling me – in his baritone Welsh voice, between bursts of laughter – what he used to do for a living, back before an 18.5-tonne lorry picked him up off his bicycle and deposited him fifty yards down the road. He was airlifted to a hospital in Cardiff and died twice on the operating table. ‘I got flattened. Smashed to bits!’ he booms. ‘My pelvis was blown open.’ He’s been retired for seven years, walking again for most of them. ‘I was on an episode of Ambulance,’ he adds, pissing himself laughing. Every sentence is 75 per cent words, 25 per cent cartoon facial explosion – whether he’s talking about his own near-death experience or solving a murder case.
We leave the bar and its now-empty deck and walk through town trying to find somewhere that’s still open for food at 9 p.m. It’s a small coastal village; there’s nowhere. Mattick waves at a bunch of teenage girls; they wave back. He shouts something cheery and unintelligible at a man spilling out of a pub; the man grins back. A cab driver greets him with ‘Auto!’ (Auto-Mattick, geddit?) and we pile into the car. I ask how he seems to know everyone in town. The teenage girls? He teaches at schools now, mentoring, that sort of thing. The guy outside the pub? Arrested him for burglary twenty years ago. ‘You do your job right and there’s no hard feelings,’ he says, waving at someone else out the window.
Before his retirement, Mattick worked a range of cases over thirty years, all serious crime. He was part of the team that cracked the Pembrokeshire serial killer cold case, convicting John William Cooper, in 2011, of two double murders dating back to the 1980s. Mattick loved what he did, he loved being in the thick of it – so much so that he has signed up to be on call as part of Kenyon’s disaster response team, having previously worked with Mo on plane crash victim recovery, picking up feet and heads on a mountain. ‘I don’t love it because of the … macabreness,’ he says, his brow furrowing. ‘There was a guy, a boss, lovely bloke, strong Carmarthen accent, he’d have a room full of detectives and he used to say – and he got this from someone who taught him, in the Met – There’s no greater privilege in life than being allowed to investigate the death of another human being. That’s a huge statement. It’s massive. You are going to play a small part in doing that. Somebody is entrusting you to do that.’
We find the only restaurant in a nearby town that’s still open – a Chinese, down a small backstreet – order most of the menu plus chips, and he tells me about the cases that stick in his mind. He’s quieter now than he was on the balcony, digging up the stories while we wait for the spring rolls. But they’re not buried all that deep.
Christmas Day, a dead baby. Three months old. Mattick left his own house on Christmas morning to visit the scene – a small property on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. ‘They were a lovely couple, had tried for the baby for years and years,’ he says, looking pained. ‘And you have to interview the parents, you have to get their statements. You have to make them feel comfortable, but you’re still asking them the same questions as if they were guilty.’ This is the side of the story I didn’t see in the mortuary, as the police sat on their stools nearby, when Lara explained that SIDS is only ruled when everything else is ruled out. For Mattick, the smell of Christmas – the turkey, the tree, the cheap plastic and faint gunpowder of Christmas crackers – still brings it back to him: the wailing and the crying as he removed both the baby and the cot.
Another: a drowned father and son, fourteen days after they went missing, their bodies finally revealed by the low tide. The father’s rigid hand still gripping a rock in the bay, the other holding the boy he had tried to save. ‘Years later, I think: he died with his son. In his mind, he was thinking, I’m not letting go of my son. How could he, with two tides a day, and with the pull of the current, still hold onto a rock and hold onto his boy?’ I nod, remembering Kevin the embalmer explaining that the physical manifestation of fear, like tension on a rollercoaster, can instantaneously freeze your muscles in place if that’s the moment you die. It’s called a cadaveric spasm. I wonder for a moment if Mattick is expecting more of a reaction out of me; I’m hearing the story of a dead father and son and thinking about the practical cause of the grip, the chemicals in the body. How would I have reacted before I started this book? I imagine I would have asked about the mother. But I don’t.
He empties the rest of the bottle of wine into my glass and signals for another one, finding a place for it on the last patch of table not covered by plates and spilled fried rice. Then he goes on, recalling a man on fire on CCTV. ‘Most of the people I see are dead, but this was somebody dying,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen knives, guns, heads blown off, mouths blown off. An elderly man who was just the outer shell, the rest of him had dripped through the ceiling because he had been left so long. Wash-ups on the beach. One where a train chopped a guy in half – I had the legs, my mate had the other half. I’ve seen a girl, ejected out the back of a car – the whole back of her skull was missing. The nurse was doing mouth-to-mouth at three in the morning, on the road, and as she blew in her mouth she was spraying gunk all over my feet. The girl had no brain, nothing left, it had all fallen out. The nurse didn’t know, she couldn’t see the level of trauma – she had no light. She was blowing, but it didn’t sound right. It was coming right out the back of her head. I said to her, “I’m so sorry.” She looked up, she had blood round her face.’
He shovels some more food onto his plate while I sit with the image of a nurse on her knees, trying desperately in the dark. He’s already moved on to the next story, chuckling now. ‘Another one, a guy, he was huge. Died upstairs, we couldn’t get him down the beautiful wooden staircase. The undertaker had to cough to mask the sound of us snapping him in half to get him round the bend,’ he’s laughing into his napkin.
‘The sound of rigor snapping is pretty memorable,’ I say, because what else do you say after a list like that, though I realise later, while listening to the interview tape, that ‘Oh my God’ or ‘Fuck’ might have been more normal.
‘You’ve heard it?’ Mattick says, eyebrows raised behind his napkin. He puts it back down on his lap and looks at me like he’s not sure what we’re here for any more. I’m supposed to be the one who hasn’t seen anything, the one asking what it’s like. So I tell him what I’ve been doing. I tell him about the bodies in the mortuaries, the skull in the ash, the coffin on the hill. I tell him about the brain in my hands and the baby in the bathtub. I notice I’m listing them like he did.
‘You’re asking me about stuff that you’re already going through,’ he says. ‘I’m not taking the piss. You’re asking me what sticks with me, and you’ve already got things in you. I don’t mean to turn it on you, but that’s what it is. I’m surprised you haven’t gone through six bottles on your own! And you’re asking me questions? You’re already there, mate. You have, um, gone for it.’
I shrug awkwardly, my face saying what I hope comes across as, I didn’t mean to, not this much. In the beginning, the plan was simple: I was going to interview death workers about how they do their jobs and how they deal with it all in their heads; maybe they’d show me if I kept out of the way. I was going to follow the body from mortuary to burial and report on what I saw. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people before, about lots of different things: films, boxing, typefaces, stories both happy and sad. I’m a tourist in various worlds, and I figured I would be a tourist in this one, packing up my notepad and voice recorder and leaving when I was finished – I don’t think you can see something once and call yourself a local, no matter how much you pay attention. Even so, I had seen more than I expected to. I had felt more than I expected to. ‘Honestly, I was fine with everything except for the baby,’ I tell him, because it’s true. I was busy looking at the avalanche and it was the small bouncing pebble that got me right between the eyes.
Maybe Mattick is right. Maybe I’ve seen enough – I’m ‘already there’. Maybe this is my last interview; he’s just given me the green light to stop.
Neither of us says anything. Mattick has stopped eating. He’s looking at me, mentally updating where he thinks I’m at. Earlier, at the bar, it had taken some encouragement to get him to talk openly about his work – he was giving me the headlines (loudly), the pre-watershed broadcast. He assumed I hadn’t seen any of it, and that I didn’t actually want to hear the details because experience has taught him that no one ever does, not really, and the dispersing crowd at the bar didn’t convince him otherwise. It was hours before he told me about the nurse on her knees and the old man dripping through the ceiling. I’ve made no assumptions with you, reader, about what you can handle – it would be antithetical to what I was trying to do, conceding to the cultural barriers I was trying to go beyond – and now you’re here with me. The sound of the restaurant fills the silence between me and Mattick.
‘The thing is, now…’ He sits back and stares off to the corner of the room, past the golden cat with the waving hand, deciding whether or not to say whatever it is he’s about to say. ‘No, I’ll come out with it because you’re doing the book – don’t take it the wrong way.’ He leans forward, serious. ‘You’ll never get rid of the pictures. I don’t mean that to be nasty. There will be triggers that will bring these things back to you. You’ll be somewhere, and you won’t know why, but all of a sudden it will crop up. And you won’t be able to stop it. Because what you’ve seen isn’t normal. The things you were asking me about – you’ve just stepped into it.’
He tells me that it’s down to where and how I file away the images: that right now they’re at the forefront, but soon they won’t be. ‘I’ve been doing this thirty years,’ he says. ‘Nurses do it. Firefighters do it. You’re going to have to be able to detach yourself, or you’re going to wonder what the hell you were doing.’
It makes perfect sense to me now, all those times the people I’ve spoken to have said they talk to their colleagues, rather than a therapist, when something has got to them – someone who was there, who saw what they saw – whether it’s Clare and her fellow midwives in the break room or Mo at an annual barbecue. Funeral directors, embalmers and APTs trade stories at conferences, knowing that no one around them will flinch. Many of them remind me of what I’ve read about soldiers who feel they can only talk to other soldiers because their frames of reference are so out of the ordinary, the context so far removed from everyday life. They want someone with a shared experience, not just a clinical understanding. I don’t have colleagues who understand. So I sit at a computer and I type it all up. I tell Mattick that the baby is so much on my mind that I sit beside people in cafes with their babies in their baskets and I picture them dead. Or my friends casually mention they sleep with their baby between them and statistics on co-sleeping deaths flash in my mind. I tell him I’m no fun at parties because I will corner someone and tell them about the baby. It doesn’t take much. All they have to do is ask me how I am.
‘But I’ll be amazed if you say it hasn’t made you more appreciative,’ he says. ‘It will change you, in a nice way. A lot of the time it makes you very humbled. You look at the babies, and even though your mind’s going one way, you appreciate it more – you’ve seen the other side. To me, the expression is it makes you better. I don’t mean better than somebody else, what I mean is it makes you better in yourself. You will be able to see things better. Do things better. Because you’ve been exposed to things that generally people aren’t going anywhere near. And rightly so.’ I nod. If nothing else, my time being around the dead has made me more patient with people, which might explain why so many death workers have been so patient with me, so open with someone they had only just met. I argue less. I still get angry, but it feels muted. As a champion grudge-holder, I have now forgotten most of them.
‘Do you have any regrets about putting yourself in the position you did with your job?’
‘That’s one word that doesn’t feature,’ he says, completely certain of it. ‘I’ve never, ever regretted. I can be corny now and say we’re all on a journey – you’ve chosen yours. You make a decision, you go with it. The worst thing you can do is not finish it. Then you’d have a regret.’
In psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, about the clinical basis of trauma in the mind and body, he writes that the body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones, which are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease. ‘However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster – rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals – utilise their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised.’ These death workers, these ‘helpers’ as Fred Rogers might say, can deal with it mentally because they are dealing with it physically – they are doing something while we (while I) sit by. ‘Nonetheless,’ van der Kolk continues, ‘everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.’
The thing I discovered again and again in speaking to people who work with the dead is that nobody takes it in all at once. Nobody sees the whole of death, even if death is their job. The death machine works because each cog focuses on their one patch, their corner, their beat, like the worker in the doll factory who paints the face and sends the doll off somewhere else for her hair. Nobody collects the dead body from the roadside, autopsies it, embalms it, dresses it and pushes it into the fire. It is a series of people, connected in their industry, disconnected in their roles. There is no prescribed antidote to the fear of death, but your ability to function within its realm depends on where you look, and as crucially, where you don’t. I have met funeral directors who tell me they could not handle the gore of an autopsy, a crematorium worker who could not dress a dead man because it is too personal, and a gravedigger who can stand neck-deep in his own grave in the day but is scared of the cemetery at night. I have met APTs in the autopsy room who can weigh a human heart but will not read the suicide note in the coroner’s report. We all have our blinkers on, but what we block out is personal to us.
All of these death workers have their limits, but each of them is considered – they are there so nobody becomes overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge. When Mattick talks about detachment, I believe it’s a constructive detachment rather than a cold one: putting the scene in context, allowing himself space in order to perform his job effectively without collapsing. He wants me not to bury the things I have seen, not to ignore them and block them out, but to put them in a context that is meaningful. It’s a different kind of detachment from the type I saw in the executioner, who had rewritten his reality to a point where he was barely part of it, who in this new narrative had denied himself any sense of agency as a way of making peace with what he had done. Or the crime scene cleaner, who doesn’t want to know the story, who deliberately removes the image from its context so all that remains is the blood – and a countdown clock on his phone until the day he can detach himself for good.
If there is anything I want you to take from this, it’s that you should consider where your own limits might be. Throughout this entire experience, I was seeing limits put in place by other people: the father of the stillborn baby making it disappear while the mother slept; the unviewable Vietnam soldier returned in a coffin with the metal lid bolted down; the man coming to Poppy in her funeral home, asking if she would let him see his drowned brother because no one else would. These limits are often arbitrary, institutionalised assumptions that do nothing for us. I believe that limits should be personal to you, chosen by you, and as long as you have carefully considered them rather than allowed them to be dictated by cultural norms, they are right. ‘We’re not here to force a transformational experience on people who don’t want it,’ Poppy said to me, sitting in her wicker chair way back at the start of everything. ‘Our role is to prepare them, to gently give them the information they need in order to make an empowered decision.’ I believe she is right. The world is full of people telling you how to feel about death and dead bodies, and I don’t want to be one of them – I don’t want to tell you how to feel about anything, I only want you to think about it. Some of the richest, most meaningful and transformative moments of your life may lie beyond where you think your limits currently are. Help dress your dead if you feel you are able, or even if you’re just curious. We are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. Ron Troyer, the retired funeral director, learned this long ago, when he pried that lid off the soldier’s coffin, when the father looked at his son returned from the war; he did not see horror, he saw his boy.
I have thought, often, of a woman I met years ago, who told me about her mother dying in hospital. She didn’t go to see her because she didn’t want her final image to be one of death, so she let her mother die alone. She was sixty and had never seen a dead body before, and she imagined that a lifetime of memories could be replaced by a single one in a hospital bed. She believed that it was the image of death that would irreparably break something inside her, rather than the fact of her loss. I think there is urgent, life-changing knowledge to be gained from becoming familiar with death, and from not letting your limits be guided by a fear of unknown things: the knowledge that you can stand to be near it, so that when the time comes you will not let someone you love die alone.
As for my own limits, there were times when I wished I hadn’t seen the baby. But without that moment there would be a whole world of human grief and experience that would remain invisible to me. I would never have met Clare, the bereavement midwife, and it was her job more than any other that highlighted how underappreciated so many of these people are, how little we know about them, and how much they contribute not just to the management of our dead, but the management of our minds and hearts. Those who live through a traumatic experience shouldn’t be the sole keepers of that knowledge; it is because of the work of people like Clare – who not only takes the photographs for the memory boxes but remembers them herself, and sees this validation of existence as a crucial part of her job – that such experiences become less alienating, less isolating. Where does empathy come from if not seeing and trying to understand?
Trying to understand something invisible was, after all, the basis for this whole endeavour, and for me to reject one part of it would undermine my intention. I wanted to see all of it. But in many of these rooms, standing in front of these bodies, I was, for a few moments, speechless. As a journalist I’m usually full of questions, but there are parts of interview tapes where I have none – there’s dead air, the hum of a freezer, the sound of a bone saw. I would get home and I’d be mad at myself for occasionally faltering, for not looking at the photograph on Adam’s chest, or for not stepping closer when the decapitated cadaver was casually unveiled by a student who had no idea why I was there. I’d exchanged a hundred pleading emails and travelled thousands of miles to get close to the dead, why not a few more feet to examine the neatness of the cut Terry had made? What stopped me in that moment? A sense that this was not my place, that even though I was standing in the room I could still only watch from a distance? Or did I think, back then, that I couldn’t handle seeing the stump of a spine? I was standing, reacting and trying to do my job at the exact intersection of wonder and fear: ‘The two incommensurate human emotions strike and collide,’ wrote Richard Powers, ‘throwing off sparks that might equally burn or warm.’
Sometimes, when it got hard, I would ask myself what it was, exactly, that I was looking for. After seeing the first dead body in Poppy’s mortuary, had I not seen real death as I had wanted to all those years ago? What else was there to find?
In the days after I spoke to Mattick, I couldn’t shake the image of the dead father holding his son while clinging to the rock in the bay. It had a grip on my heart that I couldn’t articulate, that I couldn’t get straight in my mind. When he told me about them that night in the Chinese restaurant, I took the facts of the scene and explained them to myself with what I now knew of biological functions in death. It was reductive, detached in the same way the crime scene cleaner is detached. I wasn’t seeing the whole picture. It nagged at me for weeks, until finally I saw what was revealed by the receding tide.
The muscles cannot freeze what isn’t there. A cadaveric spasm is not regular rigor mortis, it’s a rare form of muscle stiffening that is stronger than rigor – it cannot be undone as easily as I watched Sophie in the embalming room bend the knees of the man in front of her. A cadaveric spasm happens at a moment of extreme physical tension, a moment of intense emotion. The people who found the father and his son had time-travelled to their final moment, a still life under the waves. The low tide uncovered what death had preserved: the father’s final impulse to never let go of his son. The currents in the bay are strong, and nobody drowns instantly – had this impulse been weaker, his fingers would have slipped away from the rock, their bodies would have been found elsewhere and apart. It was the same primal impulse I felt standing next to the baby in the mortuary as he went under the water – I wanted to reach out and grab him, and if it meant I could save his life, I would never let go.
Now I see all of it: death shows us what is buried in the living. By shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death we deny ourselves a deeper understanding of who we truly are. ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals,’ goes the William Gladstone quote, framed on the wall of Mo’s office at Kenyon. We are cheating ourselves out of knowing this, with our system of payments and disappearances. These unseen acts of care, the tender mercies of these death workers, show not a cold detachment from their work, but the opposite – some kind of love.
In the brief time I’ve been around death I think I’ve become more tender, yet also more toughened: accepting how all of this ends, I find myself mourning people while they’re still here. I have a collection of photos of the back of my father’s silver head as he leans over his drawing board, the pictures of the five dead women now long gone. Images on a laptop – all I had in a time when we were geographically separated by a pandemic, by a world shut down, when dying alone became the fate of thousands. This book became a personal reckoning with the trickle, shortly before the flood.
In January 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a single image of a dead Chinese man flat on his back in the street was, to me, the most telling evidence we had of the approaching cataclysm. There he lay, with his medical mask on his face. The reporters said that in the two hours they observed the scene, at least fifteen ambulances drove past on their way to other calls before a blacked-out van arrived to zip him into a body bag and disinfect the pavement where he’d been. At that point, the virus was still a distant fate, something happening to someone else. But it only takes one body out of place to signal the breakdown of something fundamental. If the bodies were staying where they fell, the death workers were struggling to cope. They work on part of the frontline that nobody claps for. Theirs is a job most noticeable in absence.
After that Chinese man, images of actual death were harder to come by in the UK press, while the government played down the threat of what was coming. As the death toll mounted, media focused more on the stories of support for the NHS, or on Captain Tom, a ninety-nine-year-old former British army officer raising money by walking slow lengths of his garden. But if deaths are just numbers on a screen every day, the reality of an invisible enemy is easier to trivialise. Down in the mortuary, an overworked Lara swapped her paper surgical mask for a rubber respirator; elsewhere, people debated the existence of the virus. News outlets tried to show us, eventually, what the inside of hospitals looked like, but unless you searched for the stories, you didn’t see coffins or body bags or temporary mortuaries – if you did, they were usually in a different country. ‘The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying,’ wrote Sontag, in her book about our response to images of pain.
At the time it felt, to me, like we were missing a huge piece of the story, but also that this failure to understand began long before the events of 2020. How can you translate digits into dead bodies, when death is already treated as abstract?
It reminded me of something the AIDS activist Cleve Jones had said to Terry Gross on an episode of Fresh Air, years ago. He was talking about being in San Francisco in 1985, when the AIDS death toll of the city had just reached 1,000. That November, he was at the annual candlelight tribute to the assassinated politicians Harvey Milk and George Moscone, standing on the corner of Castro and Market, when he became overcome with frustration at the lack of visible evidence: here he was in the epicentre of an epidemic that was rapidly spreading, yet was barely acknowledged outside of the community. All around him people were sitting in restaurants, laughing, playing music. He said, ‘I thought to myself, if we could knock down these buildings, if this was a meadow with a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, then people would look at it and they’d understand it. And if they were human beings, they would be compelled to respond.’ Instead of destroying, he began creating: he started the AIDS Memorial Quilt, each piece six feet by three feet, the approximate size of a grave. Thirty-six years later, it still grows: names honoured on the quilt number 105,000. It weighs fifty-four tons. It’s the largest piece of community folk art in the world. And it is there because the bodies are hard to conceive of, and easy to ignore, if you cannot see them – or your prejudice says they don’t matter.
In 2020, people were saying breathless goodbyes on small screens. Some were seeing death for the first time, and it was someone they loved. We were unable to mourn in the usual ways: we couldn’t attend their funerals, but many were broadcast on Zoom – another thing on another screen. We were left with just the idea of death. In April, when the world had trouble sleeping, BBC Radio 3 teamed up with the European Broadcasting Union to simulcast Max Richter’s Sleep, an eight-hour lullaby, across fifteen channels in Europe, the USA, Canada and New Zealand.
Action rarely looks like inaction, but in this crisis you could save lives by sitting on your sofa, staring at the wall. The psychological impact of lockdown was not just that we were inside, alone, or crowded in with our families: we had all of these stress hormones and nothing to do with them. Inertia bred anxiety and a feeling of hopelessness – never knowing the quantifiable effect of what your doing nothing did. Over 250,000 people in the UK volunteered to be a helper to have some tangible hold on the world as it fell apart.
As the daily death toll crept from the single digits to the forties, doubling every few days until it hit the hundreds and thousands, I thought: each of these is a person, a body in a bag. Someone, somewhere, took care of every one of them, just like someone did with my friend when they pulled her from that flooded creek. Some of them are in this book that I started long ago, and finished in a city locked down. Stuck in the house – my brain turned to mush by stress and uselessness – I noticed for the first time, like a lot of people, the garden. I hadn’t previously cared beyond standing at the back door throwing scraps of dinner to the family of crows we had befriended. But I started, very tentatively, to cut down the vines and brambles that had swallowed small trees. I took pictures of other things to figure out if they were supposed to be there or if they too were a weed. After weeks of hacking, pulling and digging in the kind of clay that makes a perfect burial plot but a difficult garden, I started to plant things. I watched tiny life sprout from the soil no matter what happened in the news, no matter how little I knew, no matter how many people died. The relentlessness of nature was emotionally sustaining, but none of this was a distraction from what was happening beyond the garden gate: it was a way of processing it.
Thinking about death and the passage of time is part of tending a garden. You put things in the ground knowing they might fail. You grow things knowing they will die with the frosts six months from now. An acceptance of an end and a celebration of a short, beautiful life is all tucked up in this one act. People say gardening is therapeutic, that putting your hands in soil and effecting change on the world makes you feel alive and present, like something you do matters even if it’s only in this one terracotta pot. But the therapy runs deeper than physicality: from the start of spring, every month is a countdown to an end. Every year, the gardener accepts, plans for and even celebrates death in the crisping seed heads that sparkle with ice in winter: a visible reminder of both an end and a beginning.
As the cold came, so did more death. In New York, freezer trucks that had been parked outside hospitals for extra mortuary space in the first wave were still there: 650 bodies on the Brooklyn waterfront belonging to families who either could not be located or could not afford a burial. Los Angeles county temporarily suspended air-quality regulations and lifted the limit on monthly cremations to tackle the backlog. In Brazil, when the daily death toll spilled over 4,000, nurses on Covid isolation wards filled nitrile gloves with warm water and placed them in the hands of patients to simulate human touch, so they wouldn’t feel alone. Back in late March 2020, standing in the Rose Garden – hundreds of thousands of deaths ago – President Donald Trump said, ‘I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.’
We’ve always had death. We’ve just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won’t happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere – to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.