I have put quote marks around direct quotes from the source, otherwise they are references.
‘Life is tragic simply because the earth turns’: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Penguin, 2017 edition, p. 79.
my dad – Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist – was working on a graphic novel: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell, Top Shelf Productions, San Diego, 1989, 1999.
On average, 6,324 people in the world die every hour – that’s 151,776 every day, about 55.4 million a year: World Health Organisation, ‘The Top 10 Causes of Death’, 9 December 2020. <who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death>
Becker considered death to be both the ender and the propeller of the world: Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, The Free Press, New York, 1973.
‘How can you be sure it is death you fear?’: Don DeLillo, White Noise, Penguin, New York, 2009, p. 187. Reproduced with permission of Pan Macmillan, the Licensor, through PLSclear (UK). Also with permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US).
a shy academic in charge of Bentham’s care had shown it to me for a piece I was writing: Hayley Campbell, ‘This Guy Had Himself Dissected by His Friends and His Skeleton Put on Public Display’, BuzzFeed, 8 June 2015. <buzzfeed.com/hayleycampbell/why-would-you-put-underpants-on-a-skeleton>
I remember the filmmaker David Lynch, in an interview, talking about visiting a mortuary: David Lynch: The Art Life, dir. Jon Nguyen, Duck Diver Films, 2016, DVD, Thunderbird Releasing.
Denis Johnson wrote about this smell … ethyl mercaptan, the first in a series of compounds brought out in the process of putrefaction: Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Jonathan Cape, London, 2018, in the short story Triumph Over the Grave, p. 121.
‘The edge of death and dying is around everything like a warm halo of light’: David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2017, p. 119. © David Wojnarowicz, 1991. Extracts from Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration reproduced with permission of Canongate Books Ltd (UK) and Vintage/Penguin Random House LLC (US).
In 1883, three decades after the town was founded, a tornado tore the place apart: Ken Burns Presents: The Mayo Clinic, Faith, Hope, Science, dir. Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers, 2018, DVD, PBS Distribution.
‘You know this shit is bad when you gotta go to the fucking North Pole to find out what’s wrong with you’: Billy Frolick, ‘Back in the Ring: Multiple Sclerosis Seemingly Had Richard Pryor Down for the Count, but a Return to His Roots Has Revitalized the Giant of Stand-Up’, LA Times, 25 October 1992. <latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-25-ca-1089-story.html>
a WIRED magazine article about a new, more environmentally sound method of cremating bodies with super-heated water and lye instead of fire: Hayley Campbell, ‘In the Future, Your Body Won’t Be Buried … You’ll Dissolve’, WIRED, 15 August 2017. <wired.co.uk/article/alkaline-hydrolysis-biocremation-resomation-water-cremation-dissolving-bodies>
The shift from carrying out dissections on animals to the human dead was a focus of political, societal and religious tension: All historical facts on body donation rely heavily on Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Penguin, London, 1988, pp. xiii, 31–2, 36, 39, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 64, 260.
When I saw it in an exhibition in 2012, it was placed on the same shelf as a slice of Einstein’s brain: Marius Kwint and Richard Wingate, Brains: The Mind as Matter, Wellcome Collection, London, 2012.
‘This my will and special request I make, not out of affectation of singularity’: Jeremy Bentham, quoted by Timothy L. S. Sprigge, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1: 1752 to 1776, UCL Press, London, 2017, p. 136.
since the rise in bequests coincides with an increased cremation rate, perhaps the spiritual associations of the corpse had changed in the post-war period: Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, p. 260.
Today’s UK medical cadavers are now exclusively the bodies of those who have donated them, which isn’t true of everywhere in the world: Figures found in a study by Juri L. Habicht, Claudia Kiessling, MD and Andreas Winkelmann, MD, ‘Bodies for Anatomy Education in Medical Schools: An Overview of the Sources of Cadavers Worldwide’, Academic Medicine, vol. 93, no. 9, September 2018, Table 2, pp. 1296–7. <ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6112846>
‘Anatomy is the very basis of surgery … it informs the head, gives dexterity to the hand, and familiarises the heart with a sort of necessary inhumanity’: William Hunter, ‘Introductory Lecture to Students’, St Thomas’s Hospital, London, printed by order of the trustees, for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1784, p. 67. Provided by Special Collections of the University of Bristol Library. <wellcomecollection.org/works/p5dgaw3p>
Wyoming – a state in the heart of the American male suicide epidemic: ‘Suicide Mortality by State’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. <cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm>
Calen Ross shot himself and died in south-western Minnesota: Associated Press, ‘Widow Gets “Closure” after Meeting the Man Who Received Her Husband’s Face’, USA Today, 13 November 2017. <eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/11/13/widow-says-she-got-closure-after-meeting-man-who-got-her-husbanmtouches-man-who-got-her-husbands-fac/857537001>
To prepare for the operation, the surgeons, nurses, surgical technicians and anaesthetists spent fifty weekends in Terry’s lab: ‘Two Years after Face Transplant, Andy’s Smile Shows His Progress’, Mayo Clinic News Network, 28 February 2019. <newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/2-years-after-face-transplant-andysandness-smile-shows-his-progress>
Published (in English) in 1929, it’s a collection of death masks ranging from the fourteenth century up to the twentieth: Ernst Benkard, Undying Faces, Hogarth Press, London, 1929.
Kate O’Toole laughed that it was ‘classic O’Toolery’ that he would end up in the mortuary drawer beside Biggs: Death Masks: The Undying Face, BBC Radio 4, 14 September 2017. Produced by Helen Lee. <bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0939wgs>
The British Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg had his father’s face cast: Ibid.
You can see Nick’s process for making a death mask in a grainy three-minute video on YouTube: Amador, Resistor Films, YouTube, 9 November 2009. <youtu.be/zxb9dMYdmx4>
at UCL are thirty-seven masks they don’t know what to do with, remnants of a long-dead phrenologist’s collection: Hayley Campbell, ‘13 Gruesome, Weird, and Heartbreaking Victorian Death Masks’, BuzzFeed, 13 July 2015. <buzzfeed.com/hayleycampbell/death-masks-and-skull-amnesty>
‘The Thief of the Century’: Duncan Campbell, ‘Crime’, Guardian, 6 March 1999. <theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/1999/mar/06/weekend.duncancampbell>
‘no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality’: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, Penguin, New York, 2006, p. 1. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US).
According to Richard Shepherd, the forensic pathologist in charge of London and south-east England at the time, it was one of a series of disasters that revolutionised things: Richard Shepherd, ‘How to Identify a Body: The Marchioness Disaster and My Life in Forensic Pathology’, Guardian, 18 April 2019. <theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/18/how-to-identify-a-body-the-marchioness-disaster-and-my-life-in-forensic-pathology>
it’s a common occurrence for close relatives to have doubts about, deny or mistakenly agree to the identity of a deceased person: Public Inquiry into the Identification of Victims following Major Transport Accidents, Report of Lord Justice Clarke, vol. 1, p. 90, quoting Bernard Knight, Forensic Pathology (2nd edition, chapter 3), printed in the UK for The Stationery Office Limited on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, February 2001.
‘However … that person clearly did not know that not seeing them is even worse’: Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain’s Top Forensic Pathologist, Michael Joseph, London, 2018, p. 259. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. (UK), © 2018 Richard Shepherd.
In March 1991, United Airlines Flight 585, a Boeing 737-200, was approaching Colorado Springs to land: National Civil Aviation Review Commission, Testimony of Gail Dunham, 8 October 1997. <library.unt.edu/gpo/NCARC/safetestimony/dunham.htm>
it rolled to the right, pitched nose-down until near vertical and hit the ground: ‘United Airlines – Boeing B737-200 (N999UA) flight UA585’, Aviation Accidents, 15 September 2017. <aviation-accidents.net/united-airlines-boeing-b737-200-n999ua-flight-ua585/>
Some of the surviving relatives of victims knew vaguely where the bodies were buried … she said, ‘Now I can die happily. Because now I know I’ll see him, even in a bone, or an ash.’: The Silence of Others, dir./prod. by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, El Deseo/Semilla Verde Productions/Lucernam Films, 2018. Broadcast on BBC’s Storyville in December 2019.
Mendieta died a year after her father was found in the cemetery where he was shot: ‘Ascensión Mendieta, 93, Dies: Symbol of Justice for Franco Victims’, New York Times, 22 September 2019. <nytimes.com/2019/09/22/world/europe/ascension-mendieta-dies.html>
a thirty-year-old computer programmer for Apple and Netscape named Thomas Dell, who ran the site anonymously under the pseudonym Soylent: Taylor Wofford, ‘Rotten.com Is Offline’, The Outline, 29 November 2017. <theoutline.com/post/2549/rotten-com-is-offline>
Though the photo was a fake, the sheer fact that he dared to publish it blew up in the global press: Janelle Brown, ‘The Internet’s Public Enema No. 1’, Salon, 5 March 2001. <salon.com/2001/03/05/rotten_2/>
‘The gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look’: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin, London, 2003, p. 38.
The scene that changed everything for him was when Harvey Keitel turns up as Winston Wolfe: Pulp Fiction, written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, directed by Quentin Tarantino, Miramax Films, 1994. Reprinted by permission of Quentin Tarantino.
The detective in charge at the time described it to the East Bay Times as ‘a takeover robbery, a real violent one’: John Geluardi and Karl Fischer, ‘Red Onion Owner Slain in Botched Takeover Robbery’, East Bay Times, 28 April 2007. <eastbaytimes.com/2007/04/28/red-onion-owner-slain-in-botched-takeover-robbery/>
Andy Warhol was brought up a Catholic and was obsessed with images of death: Bradford R. Collins, ‘Warhol’s Modern Dance of Death’, American Art, vol. 30, no. 2, University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 33–54. <journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/688590>
‘The more you look at the same exact thing … the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel’: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, p. 50 (in Collins, Warhol, p. 33).
‘Sometimes he would say that he was scared of dying if he went to sleep … So he’d lie in bed and listen to his heart beat’: Henry Geldzahler, quoted in Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie:An American Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982, p. 201 (in Collins, Warhol, p. 37). Quoted with permission from the Plimpton Estate.
‘Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death’: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 21.
‘Murder,’ he said, ‘is my business’: Brian Wallis, Weegee: Murder Is My Business, International Center of Photography and DelMonico Books, New York, 2013, p. 9.
‘I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard’: Margaret Bourke-White, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s Thousand Years, Arcole Publishing, Auckland, 2018.
Her photographs, published in LIFE magazine: Ben Cosgrove, ‘Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945’, TIME, 10 October 2013. <time.com/3638432/>
Days later, the paper ran a notice saying the vulture was shooed away: ‘Editor’s Note’, New York Times, 30 March 1993. <nytimes.com/1993/03/30/nyregion/editors-note-513893.html>
‘I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain’: Scott Macleod, ‘The Life and Death of Kevin Carter’, TIME, 24 June 2001. <content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,165071,00.html>
‘compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers … One starts to get bored,’ she says, ‘cynical, apathetic’: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 90–1.
this is the same state that, in 1992, saw then-governor Bill Clinton rush home from his presidential campaign trail to witness the execution of Ricky Ray Rector: Marc Mauer, ‘Bill Clinton, “Black Lives” and the Myths of the 1994 Crime Bill’, Marshall Project, 11 April 2016. <themarshallproject.org/2016/04/11/bill-clinton-black-lives-and-the-myths-of-the-1994-crime-bill>
In a letter dated 28 March 2017, signed by twenty-three former death row staff from across the nation: Letter to Governor Hutchinson, Constitution Project, 28 March 2017. <archive.constitutionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Letter-to-Governor-Hutchinson-from-Former-Corrections-Officials.pdf>
The licence plates on the vehicles in front of us say ‘Virginia is for Lovers’, all of them manufactured by inmates at a prison shop west of the city centre: Virginia Correctional Enterprises Tag Shop, Virginia Department of Corrections, YouTube, 12 April 2010. <youtu.be/SC-pzhP_kGc>
The United States was in the midst of a brief nationwide moratorium on capital punishment, bookended by two court cases: Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions, HarperCollins, New York, 2000, pp. 40–1.
What is generally agreed to be the first American execution was carried out there in Jamestown: Ibid., p. 24.
In the state of New York, some were known to the public by name … Others worked anonymously: Jennifer Gonnerman, ‘The Last Executioner’, Village Voice, 18 January 2005. <web.archive.org/web/20090612033107/http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-01-18/news/the-last-executioner/1>
The man who operated Florida’s electric chair would already be wearing a hood: Lifton and Mitchell, Who Owns Death?, p. 88.
Florida was less covert than most and put out an ad for the job in the paper; they received twenty applications: Ibid.
Virginia’s original electric chair, constructed by inmates in 1908 from an old oak tree: Deborah W. Denno, ‘Is Electrocution an Unconstitutional Method of Execution? The Engineering of Death over the Century’, William & Mary Law Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 1994, p. 648. <scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol35/iss2/4>
according to one account by an attorney who was present, as a witness, as a representative to the General Assembly of Virginia, it did not go well: Ibid., p. 664.
He was the first to be executed by electrical current, if we don’t count the old horse they tested the voltage on: Mark Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death, Sutton, Stroud, 2003, p. 225.
when the burned skin on his back was removed, the pathologist described his spinal muscles as looking like ‘overcooked beef’: ‘Far Worse than Hanging: Kemmler’s Death Provides an Awful Spectacle’, New York Times, 7 August 1890. <timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1890/08/07/103256332.pdf>
Sweat, however, is an excellent conductor: Katherine R. Notley, ‘Virginia Death Row Inmates Sue to Stop Use of Electric Chair’, Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 20, no. 9, 1993, p. 66. <larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1993/eirv20n09-19930226/eirv20n09-19930226_065-virginia_death_row_inmates_sue_t.pdf>
‘whose touch was so profane that he could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them’: Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 71–2. Reproduced with permission of Oxford Publishing Ltd, the Licensor, through PLSclear.
‘one of the most effective means of impugning someone’s moral character was to insinuate that they had been seen dining with the executioner’: Ibid., pp. 80–1.
Sometimes there are two switches pressed simultaneously and the machine decides which button will be live: Lifton and Mitchell, Who Owns Death?, p. 87.
Lewis E. Lawes, a warden at Sing Sing from 1920 to 1941, directed the execution of more than 200 men and women: Ibid., p. 102.
‘the machinery of death cannot run without human hands to turn the dials’: David R. Dow and Mark Dow, Machinery of Death: The Reality of America’s Death Penalty Regime, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 8. Reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis Group LLC (Books) US, the Licensor, through PLSclear.
‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’: Joan Didion, The White Album, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009, p. 11. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, © 1979 Joan Didion (UK).
Even the death squad leaders in the 1965 Indonesian genocide told themselves they were cool Hollywood gangsters: The Act of Killing, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous, Dogwoof Pictures, 2012.
statistically unproven idea of a deterrent: ‘Deterrence: Studies Show No Link between the Presence or Absence of the Death Penalty and Murder Rates’, Death Penalty Information Center. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/deterrence>
short opinion pieces about decades of sleepless nights from former superintendents: S. Frank Thompson, ‘I Know What It’s Like to Carry Out Executions’, The Atlantic, 3 December 2019. <theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/federal-executions-trauma/602785/>
‘I hope that the day is not far distant when legal slaying, whether by electrocution, hanging, lethal gas, or any other method is outlawed throughout the United States’: Robert G. Elliott, Agent of Death, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1940.
Many have argued (Norman Mailer and Phil Donahue among them) that if America is serious about killing members of its public, then it should do so with a public audience: Christopher Hitchens, ‘Scenes from an Execution’, Vanity Fair, January 1998. <archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/3472d8c9-8efa-4989-b3da-72c7922cf70a>
Norman Mailer: Christopher Hitchens, ‘A Minority of One: An Interview with Norman Mailer’, New Left Review, no. 222, March/April 1997, pp. 7–9, 13. <newleftreview.org/issues/i222/articles/christopher-hitchens-norman-mailer-a-minority-of-one-an-interview-with-norman-mailer>
Phil Donahue: ‘Donahue Cannot Film Execution’, United Press International (UPI), 14 June 1994. <upi.com/Archives/1994/06/14/Donahue-cannot-film-execution/2750771566400/>
Albert Camus wrote about the guillotine: Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1966, p. 175.
Jerry got a new job driving trucks for a company that installs guardrails along interstate highways: Dale Brumfield, ‘An Executioner’s Song’, Richmond Magazine, 4 April 2016. <richmondmagazine.com/news/features/an-executioners-song/>
Morgan Freeman put him in his documentary series about God: ‘Deadly Sins’, Season 3, Episode 4 of The Story of God with Morgan Freeman, exec. prod. Morgan Freeman, Lori McCreary and James Younger, 2019, National Geographic Channel.
Dow B. Hover, a deputy sheriff, was the last person to serve as executioner in the state of New York … In 1990, he gassed himself in that same garage. John Hulbert, who served as New York’s executioner from 1913 to 1926 … shot himself with a .38-calibre revolver: Jennifer Gonnerman, ‘The Last Executioner’, The Village Voice, 18 January 2005.
Donald Hocutt, who mixed the chemicals for the gas chamber in Mississippi, was haunted by nightmares: Lifton and Mitchell, Who Owns Death?, pp. 89–90.
‘You’ve got five guys. One live round.’: Jerry is slightly mistaken on the numbers here. Execution by firing squad involves five riflemen with four live rounds and one blank. Jerry’s point, however, remains.
Twelve hours later the entire body is rigid: Val McDermid, Forensics: The Anatomy of a Crime Scene, Wellcome Collection, London, 2015, pp. 80–2.
in the case of the eccentric eighteenth-century British quack dentist Martin van Butchell: Susan Isaac, ‘Martin Van Butchell: The Eccentric Dentist Who Embalmed His Wife’, Royal College of Surgeons Library Blog, 1 March 2019. <www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/martin-van-butchell/>
But as the war escalated and the death toll mounted, bodies of soldiers – both Confederate and Union – overwhelmed hospital burial grounds: Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Vintage Civil War Library, New York, 2008, pp. 61–101.
Richer families would send for the bodies via the quartermaster general: Robert G. Mayer, Embalming: History, Theory & Practice, Third Edition, McGraw Hill, New York, 2000, p. 464.
when a young colonel called Elmer Ellsworth – formerly employed as a law clerk in President Lincoln’s hometown office – was shot and killed as he seized a Confederate flag: Faust, Suffering, p. 94.
French inventor, Jean-Nicolas Gannal, whose book – detailing his method of preserving bodies for anatomical study: Anne Carol, ‘Embalming and Materiality of Death: France, Nineteenth Century’, Mortality, vol. 24, no. 2, 2019, pp.183–92. <tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13576275.2019.1585784>
In his shopfront in Washington DC, he displayed the body of an unknown man: Faust, Suffering, p. 95.
the US Army received complaints from families saying they had been cheated by embalmers: Ibid., pp. 96–7.
One embalmer in Puerto Rico has since taken it to an extreme, posing bodies like statues at their own wakes: Nick Kirkpatrick, ‘A Funeral Home’s Specialty: Dioramas of the (Propped Up) Dead’, Washington Post, 27 May 2014. <washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/27/a-funeral-homes-specialty-dioramas-of-the-proppedup-dead/>
‘the ugly facts are relentlessly hidden; the art of embalmers is an art of complete denial’: Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Pornography of Death’, Encounter, October 1955, pp. 49–52.
‘donning the mantle of the psychiatrist when it suits their purposes’: Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited, Virago, London, 2000, p. 64. Reproduced with the permission of the Jessica Mitford heirs.
I had described the physical process of embalming as ‘violent’ in a magazine article: Campbell, ‘In the future…’, WIRED.
between 50 per cent and 55 per cent of bodies in the UK are embalmed in a typical year: Email exchange with Karen Caney FBIE, National General Secretary, British Institute of Embalmers.
Those embalmed men returned from the Civil War continue to leach arsenic – a long-ago outlawed ingredient – into the soil around them: Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato, ‘Arsenic and Old Graves: Civil War-Era Cemeteries May Be Leaking Toxins’, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 October 2015. <smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/arsenic-and-old-graves-civil-war-era-cemeteries-may-be-leaking-toxins-180957115/>
These days in the US, more than 3 million litres of embalming fluid, complete with carcinogenic formaldehyde, are buried every year: Green Burial Council, ‘Disposition Statistics’, via Mary Woodsen of Cornell University and Greensprings Natural Preserve in Newfield, New York. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <greenburialcouncil.org/media_packet.html>
In 2015, flooding in cemeteries in Northern Ireland brought the chemicals to the surface: Malachi O’Doherty, ‘Toxins Leaking from Embalmed Bodies in Graveyards Pose Threat to the Living’, Belfast Telegraph, 10 May 2015. <belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/toxins-leaking-from-embalmed-bodies-in-graveyards-pose-threat-to-the-living-31211012.html>
In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, families periodically take the dead out of their tombs to wash and dress them: Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity, W.W. Norton, New York, 2017, pp. 42–77.
the infant mortality rate in the UK is, while falling, still higher than other comparable countries: ‘How Does the UK’s Infant Mortality Rate Compare Internationally?’, Nuffield Trust, 29 July 2021. <nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/infant-and-neonatal-mortality>
an English soap star campaigned for foetuses born dead before a certain age to have birth certificates as well as death certificates: Seamus Duff and Ellie Henman, ‘Law Changer: Kym Marsh Relives Heartache of Her Son’s Tragic Death as She Continues Campaign to Change Law for Those Who Give Birth and Lose Their Baby’, The Sun, 31 January 2017. <thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/2745250/kym-marsh-relives-heartache-of-her-sons-tragic-death-as-she-continues-campaign-to-change-law-for-those-who-give-birth-and-lose-their-baby/>
‘the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life’: Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980, p. 4. Reproduced with permission of Columbia University Press.
Maggie Rae, president of the Faculty of Public Health, was quoted in the British Medical Journal: Matthew Limb, ‘Disparity in Maternal Deaths because of Ethnicity is “Unacceptable”’, The BMJ, 18 January 2021. <bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n152>
they were self-appointed carers during pregnancy and birth: ‘Tracing Midwives in Your Family’, Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists/Royal College of Midwives, 2014. <rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/library-services/heritage/rcm-genealogy.pdf>
lay out the dead: ‘How Do You Lay Someone Out When They Die?’, Funeral Guide, 22 February 2018. <funeralguide.co.uk/blog/laying-out-a-body>
only 12 per cent of neonatal units have mandatory bereavement training: ‘Audit of Bereavement Care Provision in UK Neonatal Units 2018’, Sands, 2018. <sands.org.uk/audit-bereavement-care-provision-uk-neonatal-units-2018>
it is estimated that one in every four pregnancies ends in loss during pregnancy or birth. One in every 250 pregnancies ends in stillbirth; eight babies are stillborn across the UK every day: ‘Pregnancy Loss Statistics’, Tommy’s. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <tommys.org/our-organisation/our-research/pregnancy-loss-statistics>
fewer than half of the women who experience a miscarriage ever find out why it happened: ‘Tell Me Why’, Tommy’s. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <tommys.org/our-research/tell-me-why>
Ariel Levy talks about the miscarriage she had at five months on the bathroom floor in a hotel in Mongolia: Ariel Levy, ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’, New Yorker, 10 November 2013. <newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia> Text from this article was reproduced in her book: Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply, Random House, New York, 2017/Fleet, London, 2017, pp. 145–6,235–6. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US).
of the 377 women spoken to whose babies were stillborn or died soon after birth: Katherine J. Gold, Irving Leon, Martha E. Boggs and Ananda Sen, ‘Depression and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms after Perinatal Loss in a Population-Based Sample’, Journal of Women’s Health, vol. 25, no. 3, 2016, pp. 263–8. <ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4955602/pdf/jwh.2015.5284.pdf>
the cremation rate in the UK has risen from around 35 per cent to 78 per cent of all funerals (America is lagging behind at 55 per cent): ‘International Statistics 2019’, Cremation Society. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <cremation.org.uk/International-cremation-statistics-2019>
‘blind, emotionless alien’: Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Atlantic Books, London, 2012, p. 11. Reproduced with permission from Atlantic Books Ltd (UK) and Hachette Book Group (USA).
The mayor tried to get those that stayed to move further in: Jonathan Oosting, ‘Detroit Mayor Dave Bing: Relocation “Absolutely” Part of Plan to Downsize City’, Michigan Live, 25 February 2010. <mlive.com/news/detroit/2010/02/detroit_mayor_dave_bing_reloca.html>
even Benjamin Franklin suggested something similar in 1773: Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhumanist Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge, Perseus Books, New York, 1990, p. 84.
Fiction was, after all, where he had come across the idea originally: Ibid., p. 85.
‘Only those embrace death who are half dead already’: Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1965, p. 146.
Alcor in Arizona, at $200,000: Alcor, Membership/Funding. Last viewed 1 October 2021. <alcor.org/membership/>
how the bodies of his frozen clients were stored in a garage behind a mortuary: Sam Shaw, ‘Mistakes Were Made: You’re as Cold as Ice’, This American Life, episode 354, 18 April 2008. <thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made>
recently reanimated organisms: David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, Allen Lane, London, 2019, p. 99.
researchers had, in 2019, taken the brains out of the heads of thirty-two dead pigs: Gina Kolata, ‘“Partly Alive”: Scientists Revive Cells in Brains from Dead Pigs’, New York Times, 17 April 2019. <nytimes.com/2019/04/17/science/brain-dead-pigs.html>
In the frogs, as the temperature drops, special proteins in their blood suck the water out of the cells: John Roach, ‘Antifreeze-Like Blood Lets Frogs Freeze and Thaw with Winter’s Whims’, National Geographic, 20 February 2007. <nationalgeographic.com/animals/2007/02/frog-antifreeze-blood-winter-adaptation/>
‘Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty’: David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1991, p. 177. © David Simon, 1991, 2006. Extracts from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets reproduced with permission of Canongate Books Ltd and Henry Holt & Co.
‘However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions’: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, Penguin, London, 2014, p. 217. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US). Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. (UK), © 2014 Bessel van der Kolk.
‘the two incommensurate human emotions strike and collide’: Richard Powers, introduction to DeLillo, White Noise, pp. xi–xii. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US).
a single image of a dead Chinese man: Agence France-Presse, ‘A Man Lies Dead in the Street: The Image that Captures the Wuhan Coronavirus Crisis’, Guardian, 31 January 2020. <theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/a-man-lies-dead-in-the-street-the-image-thatcaptures-the-wuhan-coronavirus-crisis>
‘The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying’: Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 63.
650 bodies on the Brooklyn waterfront: Paul Berger, ‘NYC Dead Stay in Freezer Trucks Set Up during Spring Covid-19 Surge’, Wall Street Journal, 22 November 2020. <wsj.com/articles/nyc-dead-stay-in-freezer-trucks-set-up-during-spring-covid-19-surge-11606050000>
Los Angeles county temporarily suspended air-quality regulations: Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Los Angeles Lifts Air-Quality Limits for Cremations as Covid Doubles Death Rate’, Guardian, 18 January 2021. <theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/18/los-angeles-covid-coronavirus-deaths-cremation-pandemic>
In Brazil, when the daily death toll spilled over 4,000, nurses on Covid isolation wards filled nitrile gloves with warm water: ‘Nursing Technician from São Carlos “Supports” an Intubated Patient’s Hand with Gloves Filled with Warm Water’, Globo.com, 23 March 2021. <g1.globo.com/sp/sao-carlos-regiao/noticia/2021/03/23/tecnica-em-enfermagem-de-sao-carlos-ampara-mao-de-paciente-intubada-comluvas-cheias-de-agua-morna.ghtml>
‘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’: Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, issued on 30 March 2020, press briefing held 29 March 2020, 5.43 p.m. EDT. <trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-14/