Robertson was right about one thing, though. Cooper had seen the watch house built at Bradfield to guard against men who might come by night to dig up freshly buried bodies from the churchyard. And here in Edendale was that massive block of sandstone carved in the shape of a coffin. There was no logical reason for its size and weight, except to prevent access to the grave beneath. And yet the body snatchers had never come to Edendale, or to anywhere else in Derbyshire.

Then Cooper remembered Audrey Steele, and corrected himself. Body snatchers had never come to Derbyshire – until now.

MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE TWO

And the biggest unknown is death. We’d rather not think about death at all. We fear our own dead, we believe that corpses pollute the living. To acknowledge death is to accept our own mortality, so the dead have to be hidden away, shielded by rites, prayers and superstitions. Even in death, we fear the final battle with evil. We’re afraid to face our angry gods.

That’s why we’ve produced all our myths and folklore, all our rituals and deceptions. It means the thing we have to face is only a fiction of our own creation, and not the inconceivable reality. We’re like a flock of chickens running around a yard until the day the axe falls on their necks. The only difference between us and the chickens is that we know the axe is there from the start. If you think about that too much, you might start to envy the chickens.

What happens after death is unspoken, and sometimes unspeakable. But we have to see the truth. We can close our mouths and ears, but we can’t avert our eyes. Remember those visions of death that cross your mind as you enter into sleep? Your subconscious is trying to share the knowledge that you deny.

From the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness – Nine Cemetery Contemplations:

And further, a bhikkhu sees a body thrown on to the cemetery reduced to disconnected bones, scattered in all directions – here a bone of the hand, there a bone of the foot, a shin bone, a thigh bone, the pelvis, spine and skull. So he applies this perception to his own body thus: ‘Verily, my own body, too, is of the same nature. Such it will become, and will not escape it.’

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

A manila envelope lay on Ben Cooper’s desk on Friday morning. At first, he didn’t want to touch it. It reminded him too much of the envelopes he saw at the hospital. There were always stacks of them behind the nurses’ station, full of medical records and test results. A manila envelope would contain a patient’s diagnosis and prognosis, a plan for their discharge or their disposal after death, the discreet arrangement of their living and dying, all wrapped up in brown paper.