In 1999, Sue Black – one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists – found herself confronted by a “nightmare scene that could never be adequately described”. In 38C heat, dressed in a white scene-of-crime suit, black rubber police wellies, a face mask and double latex gloves, she was standing at the door of an outhouse near a Kosovo village. More than 40 men and boys had been herded into this building and sprayed with bullets from a Kalashnikov. The bodies were then set on fire. After three hot summer months, they were now “boiling with maggots, fragmented and partly scattered and eaten by the scavenging animals”. It was Black’s unenviable task to retrieve body parts and personal effects that could be used to identify the victims, as well as to collect bullets and casings in the hope of identifying the perpetrators of this appalling war crime. The heat and smell made the task almost unbearable.
Looking back on this immensely challenging but vitally important work, Black says it was “an experience I would not trade for the world”. Whether in Kosovo or in Thailand, where she assisted with identifying victims after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Black accepts that such forensic work is “a job that nobody else in their right mind would ever want to do”. But she doesn’t think twice before volunteering, believing passionately that we need to show “that our humanity transcends the worst malevolence of which our species and nature are capable”.
Her work in war and disaster zones, as well as helping the police identify bodies, is potentially traumatic. Yet Black’s utterly gripping account of her life and career as a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology manages to be surprisingly life-affirming. As she herself says, it is “as much about life as about death”. Indeed, this unsentimental exploration of “the many faces of death” has at its heart the conviction that we should not fear death but accept it “as an integral and fundamentally necessary part of our life’s process”. Or perhaps, to echo TS Eliot’s haunting words from “East Coker”, in our end is our beginning.
• All That Remains: A Life in Death is published by Doubleday. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
