In Living Life with Death, Sarah Jones offers readers a front-row seat to the most secretive, sanitised, and squeamish corner of society—the death industry. But this isn’t a cold exposé. It’s not a glorified horror show. Instead, Jones delivers a narrative that is intimate, wryly funny, brutally honest, and unrelentingly humane.
This is not a book about death as a philosophical abstraction, nor is it a sentimental meditation on grief. It is, quite literally, a lived account of death—ten years spent recovering bodies, handling autopsies, embalming, and assisting in tissue recovery. Jones invites us into a world most of us will never glimpse, except from the other side of a closed casket. But she doesn’t just show us bodies. She shows us what it’s like to become, over time, someone who can hold a brain in one hand and still go out for lunch.
That transformation—psychological, emotional, and moral—is the true spine of the book.
What makes this memoir extraordinary is not just its subject matter, though there’s no shortage of jaw-dropping scenes: decomposed corpses teeming with maggots, charred remains pulled from fire-blackened homes, a morgue nap rudely interrupted by med students. These vignettes are delivered in precise, evocative prose—clear-eyed, unsentimental, and with an undercurrent of gallows humour that feels less like performance and more like survival instinct.
Jones’s voice is a compelling one—equal parts clinical detachment and poetic observation. One moment she is dryly remarking that embalming is “plastic caps, powdered cheeks, and a stiff little doll all dressed up with no place to go,” and the next she’s confessing to a moment of near-envy for a corpse’s peace after a soul-crushing night on call. That duality—both hardened technician and vulnerable narrator—gives the book its remarkable depth.
But perhaps the most haunting part of the book isn’t the corpses—it’s the living. The cop who flees at the sound of a post-mortem moan. The grieving mother who answers the door in tears and says, “I’m not ready.” The curious date who asks if Jones has ever found a dead body attractive. Or the six-year-old girl murdered by her father, whose tiny heart is held, tremblingly, in the narrator’s hands. These moments are presented without melodrama, but they strike like lightning. The real horror, we’re reminded, isn’t death. It’s what we do to each other before it.
Jones also manages to interrogate her own desensitisation. There are scenes where her tone turns unexpectedly reflective, even philosophical: Can we become too used to death? Is numbness a form of strength or a symptom of something more troubling? The title, Living Life with Death, is no metaphor—it’s her literal condition. The result is a memoir that reads like On Writing if King had done his apprenticeship in a morgue rather than a newsroom.
Though the structure is episodic, with brief, often vignette-style chapters, the book has a cumulative power. What begins as a series of anecdotes grows into a meditation on mortality, memory, and meaning. We’re shown not just how bodies are handled after death—but how one handles oneself after years spent surrounded by the dead.
Jones’s great strength is her ability to make the unspeakable speakable—not through shock, but through compassion. She offers a glimpse into the world of those whose job it is to ensure dignity after death, and in doing so, reminds us how thin the veil is between laughter and grief, between living and ceasing to.
Living Life with Death is not for everyone. It’s graphic, dark, and emotionally raw. But for those willing to enter the embalming room with her, Jones offers something rare: an unflinching, unforgettable look at the one thing that awaits us all, and the strange, resilient people who carry the rest of us through it.
You can buy “Living Life with Death” by Sarah Jones here!