Costel’s Reviews > Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist > Status Update

How hard PTSD is for those who have to watch it.

One day, she said, ‘We really ought to discuss our marriage.’

And I said, ‘What marriage? It hardly seems to exist.’

That was how it ended. One night in February. Not with a bang but a whimper. With little talk. But much pain. After thirty years.

However, when there was no one to meet me at Denpasar Airport, they noticed this and turned to me by the luggage carousel for the first time.

'Want a lift, Doc?'
'How did you know who I am?'
'We guessed you must be the pathologist just by looking at you.'
'How?'
'Well, for a start you didn't laugh at the movie.'

The heart is an organ one can hold neatly in the palm of one's hand. So small but so steady, a little fist, clenching and unclenching seventy times a minute, day and night, year after year, 30 billion times over a lifespan. A faithful friend. Until it stops.

People find it hard to believe that, in mass disasters, visual identification is unreliable, especially so when death has been traumatic or the body has been immersed in water.

Only moderate force is required to penetrate major organs like the heart or the liver, and so even perpetrators with little strength can kill by stabbing.

One of us was always just about to leave for work. And if we were both home there were a thousand topics which required our attention: the children and their schoolwork, difficulties at work, the house repairs... I wondered how I was supposed to fit love into all this?

I really do understand that it is hard, very hard, to recognise the finality of death. To understand that the son who was thinking and feeling and animated yesterday is not so today. To comprehend that yesterday he would have been in agony when I inserted my knife but today he cannot feel it at all.

Most people misunderstand death. They see it as an instant event. You think that one moment your daughter was alive. And the next... gone. But death just isn't like that. Humans only switch off completely, in one moment, like lights, if they're vaporized in a nuclear explosion. In all other circumstances, death is a process.

One of the normal phases of grieving is guilt. "There was nothing you could have done," won't magically wipe away guilt, but it may allow it to pass more quickly. I hope so.