Incredibly insightful and vivid—among the best journalistic writing I've read. Engrossing subject matter (each subsequent career proved captivating in unique, yet connected ways). For a book about death workers and industries, this book is so full of life.

"Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did.”

Wow. I just finished this one and am sort of at a loss for words. Obvious TW for death in general and specifically for death of children, as well as no shortage of gruesome details about how death work is carried out (though I found the gore relayed matter-of-factly).

Campbell, a journalist with an interest in the macabre - she grew up surrounded by her dad's cartoons of Jack the Ripper - takes a 3-year journey into the death industry to learn all she can about the process of death. She spends time with funeral directors, embalmers, an executioner who ended the lives of 62 people during his career, a crime scene cleaner, gravediggers, a man who runs a crematorium, a bereavement midwife, a cryonics facility operator, and a homicide detective. Throughout all this, she holds a brain during an autopsy, sees a jaw being sewn shut for a funeral, dresses a dead man for his coffin, and talks with a man who has stood in his own grave (one of the gravediggers will be buried in a family plot and dug his mother's grave). The most upsetting portions are around children and the bereavement midwife. Such important work, but also very hard to listen to.

Campbell herself is the narrator and did a superb job. I expected her to get emotional a few times - I certainly did - but she held it together. I really liked that she narrated as it felt like she was holding my hand through the book; we were walking through awful and heavy things, yes, but for a purpose. She is constantly asking the reader to reflect on why these people chose the professions they did, what such a closeness to death can do to you, and does it make anyone less fearful of death. She is often pushy and pointed here, which was appreciated as it kept my mind on the bigger picture and not mired in the details. Death is a part of life. Beginnings and endings are intertwined. Thank goodness we have people who are willing to do the needed work with the dead; everyone she encountered was incredibly respectful and understood they held a special place on the threshold between two worlds.

5 stars for the information, the questions it sparks, and the fact that this is a book that will stick with me for a long time.