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By Root 130 0

see everything. Certainly we see a lot more than most people do. Until I started to do this kind of work, I hadn’t appreciated just how separated we are from death now. When do most people see a dead body? A hundred years ago, everyone had probably seen a dead person by the time they were five, because they cared for their loved ones in death just as they had done in life. The dead person would be laid out in the house and there would be proper mourning over them; everyone would visit and view the deceased. Now, the body is taken away and it’s put into the hands of professionals, people like me. Most of us do our best and get the job done with appropriate thought and compassion, but to us it’s just a job, something we are paid to do. Relatively few people come in to view the body, and often the deceased receives no visitors at all. Once the life is gone from the body, people want to get the whole thing over as quickly and cleanly as possible, paying to have someone else do the dirty work.

And how many of us – me included, I suppose – actually see someone as they die? Dying’s become a lonely business, done in private, so as not to distress others. Since starting this job I have often wondered what it must be like to die, and to do so without someone there to hold my hand and talk to me softly. It makes me shiver and sometimes I have shed tears. I wouldn’t want to go like that.

Charles Cartwright-Jones didn’t die alone at least, although things conspired to make his death long and slow. He lived with his wife in a large, rambling house in the Stroud valley. Clive vaguely knew the place and said that it was partly derelict. Apparently they had been married over half a century and never had children, so all they had was each other. When he came into us just before lunch one dull and cold but dry day in late January, all we knew was that it was some sort of gunshot wound. We hadn’t yet got any information from the Coroner’s office, so we had to rely on what the undertakers told us, and that turned out to be one of the saddest stories I think Maddie or I had ever heard.

There was no suggestion that Mr Cartwright-Jones had set out to take his own life, and his death had almost certainly been a terrible accident. Clive, who knows a few things about guns, reckoned from what he heard that he must been carrying the gun out of the house one morning with the safety off and a cartridge in the breech. Some guns have a very light trigger and Mr Cartwright-Jones probably dropped it so that it discharged into his stomach. His wife heard the sound and came out to look for him, finding him near a garden shed. She had rushed back into the house and phoned at once for an ambulance, then gone back to comfort him and try to stop the blood that was leaking from the wound.

Something went terribly wrong, though, because the Gloucestershire ambulance service, which is normally fairly efficient, took over an hour to arrive, although no one knows quite why; possibly the message got lost, possibly the wrong address was noted down. Anyway, Mrs Cartwright-Jones didn’t dare leave her husband because he was bleeding so badly that she was afraid he would die while she was away from him. So, in the cold of the early morning, she comforted him and tried to help him and lay down beside him while he died. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what they said to each other and I don’t think it would be right if we did know. They had been married for over fifty years and there must be a lot to be said after that long. Mr Cartwright-Jones died ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, apparently just slipping away from loss of blood and perhaps the cold.

Mr Cartwright-Jones’ story ruined the day for me and, I think, for Maddie also. There wasn’t much banter the next day either as Peter Gillard did the PM with the radio turned low. The gunshot hadn’t severed any major arteries and he died from blood oozing out of a thousand tiny cut veins. Clive reckoned it must have been quite a small calibre weapon because, apart from making a hole in the front of the abdomen, the