The Edge of Mortality
‘The first dead body you see should not be someone you love,’ she said.
About fifty of us are in a large room at University College London, holding a ‘wake’ for a long-dead philosopher on his 270th birthday. His severed head, on show for the first time in decades, is in a bell jar by the Budweisers. Down the hall, his skeleton sits in a glass box as usual, dressed in his own clothes, his gloved skeletal hand perched on his walking stick, with a wax head where his real one was supposed to go, back before the plan for preservation went wrong. Students nearby pay him as much attention as they would a piece of furniture.
Between annual checks to note new stages of decrepitude, Jeremy Bentham’s real head is usually locked away in a cupboard, and nobody gets to see it. Dr Southwood Smith, executor of Bentham’s will and dissector of his body, had tried to preserve it so it looked untouched, extracting the fluids by placing the head under an air pump, over sulphuric acid. But the head turned purple and stayed that way. He admitted defeat and contacted a wax artist to create a fake one, while the real head was hidden. But three years prior to tonight’s wake, a shy academic in charge of Bentham’s care had shown it to me for a piece I was writing. We peered at his soft blond eyebrows and blue glass eyes as his dried skin filled the room with the smell of beef jerky. He told me that when Bentham was alive he used to keep his future glass eyeballs in his pocket, getting them out at parties for a laugh. Here they were now, 186 years after his death, wedged in leathery eye sockets, looking out on a room full of people gathered to talk about society’s backward attitude towards death.
Bentham was an eccentric philosopher – some of his ideas would land him in prison today, or at least get him thrown off the university campus – but he was ahead of the curve on many things. As well as being a champion of animal rights and women’s rights, he believed in gay rights at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and he was one of the first to donate his body to science. He wanted to be publicly dissected by his friends, and everyone here is the kind of person who would have gone to watch. Already we had heard from Dr John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, who talked about growing up in a funeral home, in a family where death was not taboo, another house where death was everywhere. Then a gentle palliative care doctor encouraged us to talk about our own death before it happens, to have our wishes (however mad) in place before we go, like Bentham had done. Finally, Poppy Mardall, a funeral director in her mid-thirties, stood up and told us that the first dead body you see should not be someone you love. She said that she wished she could bring schoolchildren to her mortuary to confront death before they have to. You need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief, she said. She thanked us for listening and sat down, the beer bottles clinking on the table.
In all of my thinking about death, I had never considered this idea – that you could deliberately separate these specific shocks to save your own heart. I wondered what I would be like now, if I had met her as a child and she had shown me what I had wanted to see. I was always curious about what dead bodies looked like, but I assumed that when I saw someone dead it would be because I had known them in life. It’s not like anonymous dead bodies were easy to come by – I hadn’t even been shown the one I did know, nor did I see the ones that came in the years after: more school friends (cancer, suicide), four grandparents (natural causes). The psychological impact of losing someone you love and confronting the physical reality of death at the same time, and the tangled mindfuck that might be, was not something I thought I could swerve.
A couple of weeks after Bentham’s wake, I was sitting on a wicker chair in a brightly lit room in Poppy’s funeral home, an old brick gatehouse by the entrance to Lambeth Cemetery. Colourful Easter eggs filled a small bowl in the centre of the table, poppy flower decals stuck to the vast Victorian windows. Outside, snow was gathering on the sandalled feet of a stone Jesus. Lambeth Cemetery is less grand than the famous seven that form a ring around London – Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets – those large garden cemeteries built in the nineteenth century to deal with the overcrowded parish churchyards in the middle of the growing city. Unlike them, Lambeth has no extravagant mausoleums, no grand promenades, no tombs as big as houses to flaunt the wealth of its dead inhabitants. It is practical, small, unpretentious, and so is Poppy. She’s easy to talk to – you can imagine her being a therapist, or a good mother. I had been so struck by what she said in her speech that I wanted to hear more. She clearly thought of her role as much more than a job. Also, as I had never seen a dead body before, in person – decapitated philosophers not withstanding – I wondered if she might be the one to show me. It’s not a favour you can ask of most people.
‘We don’t open the fridge doors just to see people,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘I want us to be careful with the behind-the-scenes thing – it’s not like a museum. But if you had a spare couple of hours, you could come back and help get someone ready for their funeral. Then you’re actually having an engagement with the body, rather than just seeing a load of dead people.’ I blinked at her. I didn’t think she’d actually say yes, let alone invite me to be involved in someone’s funeral preparation. I’m here because she said it’s something she wishes she could share, of course, but even so, there are some doors that have been closed for so long it can seem impossible to imagine them opening. ‘You would be very welcome,’ she insisted, filling my stunned silence.
In the UK, a funeral director needs no licence to handle the dead, as they do in America. Here, all of Poppy’s staff come from places other than the funeral industry: Poppy herself used to work at the auction house Sotheby’s, until she felt the meaninglessness of her work life bearing down on her. Aaron, who now runs the mortuary, a short walk across the cemetery from where we sit, used to work at the greyhound track nearby; the body collection van driver, Stuart, is a firefighter, and says that working here part-time is like going back for the ones he couldn’t save. Poppy said I could come and be trained like they were, as if I was starting work here too.
‘Had you seen a dead body before you became a funeral director?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that insane?’
I try to figure out the path between hectic art auction house and running a funeral home and I cannot begin to make a guess. ‘I meet people who have a much clearer reason for doing this kind of thing,’ she says, laughing. ‘For me, it wasn’t like that at all.’ The way she tells it, the route may have been winding, but her motivation is lucid, even if she couldn’t see it at the time.
It was Poppy’s love of art that got her into the world of auction houses – first Christie’s, then Sotheby’s – and it was the fun that kept her there: the adrenaline, the socialising, the unpredictable nature of where in the world she could end up. ‘A guy called saying he thought he had a Barbara Hepworth sculpture in rural Texas, so the next day I was on a flight,’ she says, picking an example she says wasn’t even particularly unusual. ‘I was twenty-five, I had buckets of responsibility, it was fun, fun, fun. But quite quickly, I felt like there was a vacuum of meaning.’ Her parents, one a social worker and the other a teacher, had instilled in her an obligation to help people in need, and her job at Sotheby’s was – while exciting – not fulfilling that need in herself. ‘From a sustenance point of view, I couldn’t live off selling paintings,’ she says.
In her spare time she became a Samaritan, volunteering to answer the phones at the charity that provides emotional support to those feeling lost or suicidal. But as her job became busier, as the travel kept her further away from home, her shifts would get missed or moved. ‘It made me very sad. I spent about two years just not having the answer. I was having a sort of quarter-life crisis.’ She knew she wanted to engage with regular people on the frontline of existence, to do something that mattered – birth, love or death, it wasn’t important which – but she couldn’t figure out how, or what, until life began to make the decision for her.
The fact that everyone we love will one day die often doesn’t dawn on us until something bad happens. Poppy hadn’t processed it herself until both of her parents got cancer diagnoses in quick succession. ‘Our family is super open about everything,’ she says. ‘My mum was rolling condoms onto bananas when I was five, which didn’t make any sense to me, she just loved the idea of breaking taboos. But we didn’t really talk about death. We’d never had that discussion, or not in a way that I understood it. I was twenty-seven when my dad got sick, and it was genuinely the first time I realised he was ever going to die.’
This realisation arrived in the maelstrom of her crisis about her job. Conversations long ignored were now being had. When it was clear that both of her parents were going to survive, she saved some money, quit the art world and went to Ghana for a break. There she got typhoid and nearly died too.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I say.
‘I know! Anyway, I was sick for eight months, so it gave me this very long period of inactivity and a chance to think. The job I would have picked if I hadn’t got typhoid would have been a lot safer. This,’ she says, motioning to the funeral home around us, ‘was definitely the craziest thing on my list.’
Funeral directing was on the list not only because it involves one of the big life events Poppy wanted to be part of, but because her mother had made it clear what she did and did not want in a funeral. Researching options as her parents became sick, Poppy had seen how stuck in the past the industry was, how little room there was for personalisation. The shiny black hearses and top hats, the stilted formal processions, were not right for a family like hers. Now she wanted to play a part in changing the world of death, but even she didn’t know what, exactly, she meant by that. It wasn’t until she started her training by shadowing existing funeral directors, at the tail end of her own sickness, when the fatigue had lifted enough to leave the house, that she understood what she had been missing. She stood in a mortuary and saw death for the first time in all its unterrifying banality, and it struck her that she was angry. She had been forced to face the idea of death – in her family, in herself – without ever knowing what it looked like.
Copyright © 2022 by Hayley Campbell