‘I spent years studying death, but it didn’t prepare me for grief’: archaeologist Sarah Tarlow on losing her husband | Books

At about 9.15 on the morning of 7 May 2016, I came home and found my husband of two weeks, my partner of 18 years, dead in bed. Still, I go over and over the way that morning unfolded. I woke at my brother Ben’s house. Since I had left Mark alone overnight for the first time in months, and because he could not get his own breakfast or medication, I set off to drive home as soon as I was dressed and had drunk a cup of tea.

I texted Mark to say I was setting off, but I got no reply. Like the previous day, it was gloriously warm and sunny, and my drive along the empty A1 was easy and quick. I parked the car and walked up to the front door. I let myself in and shouted up, “Hello. I’m home!” No answer. “Mark?” I started up the stairs. It was quite silent. I had a sick, empty feeling, as though all the organs in my abdomen had suddenly dropped about a foot. I sort of knew, but I did not absolutely know. Not yet. I thought to myself, “This is the last moment before our world changes; these are the last steps in my old life.”

His bedroom door was open, as it usually was, so he could hear the sounds of the house, of the family. He found comfort in the swill and roll of the dishwasher, the muffled chat of the radio in the kitchen. But, really, I knew before I went into the room; before I took that last step out of our life together and into widowhood, I knew what had happened. I remember most of all how he looked in the bed, lying on his back, wearing a grey T-shirt, the yellow duvet pulled up to his chest. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack, his skin the colour of a drizzly sky. He was absolutely still. Both wholly Mark and wholly dead. Oh, Mark. Oh, darling.

My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. I am a professor of archaeology, specialising in mortuary and commemorative practices. I have written dozens of papers and several books about death – and how the relationship between the living and the dead changed between the late medieval period and the 20th century. I teach classes on the archaeology and history of death; I have travelled the world giving lectures on excavated burials and standing memorials. I can tell you about the history of cemeteries or the growth of cremation; or talk about the places where people disposed of dead bodies by pickling them in alcohol, exposing them to the birds and weather, or placing them inside living trees. A few years ago, I trained to be a humanist funeral celebrant.

Even though I spend much of my waking life thinking about dead bodies, I do not find it depressing or ghoulish. I love archaeology. I enjoy the fieldwork, I like teaching at the university, I like finding out new stuff. Most of all, I love trying to work out what you can say on the basis of incomplete and inadequate data. That process of inference is what archaeology really is. People think archaeology is the same as excavation, but that is just a small part of it. Excavation is one way of retrieving evidence, but there are others; the art of archaeology is in taking all those bits of evidence – things recovered from below ground, standing remains of structures, traces in the landscape, microscopic traces in soil, bone or pot – and thinking about what they might mean, how we can use them to tell a plausible story of the past.

The details vary according to anthropological or chronological context, but everybody wants a good death. Topping the late-medieval bestseller lists were how-to manuals written entirely with this end in mind – the ars moriendi, or art of dying handbook. These books describe idealised, perfect deaths. William Caxton published an English translation, The Arte and Crafte to Know Well to Dye, in 1490. Later, Thomas Becon would write an enormously long ars moriendi text called The Sicke Mannes Salve. Sixteenth-century Britons could not get enough of it, and it ran to 17 editions between 1560 and 1620.

It is basically a single deathbed scene. As he nears the end of his life, Epaphroditus experiences the disappearance, one by one, of his five senses. He asks his friends to prop him up in bed because, he says, “I begin to wax very faint, and my breath decreaseth and waxeth shorter.” Soon after, he tells his friends that he can no longer see, and then that, “As God hath taken away my sight so do my other senses decay.” Next, he claims to have lost the power of speech, though that does not stop him from uttering pious hopes and prayers for several more pages.

An undiagnosed neurological illness meant that Mark lost so much in the years, months and weeks leading to his death. Were his final minutes a shedding of the last senses that still remained available to him? One by one, the things that kept Mark anchored in the world had been taken from him. First it was his abilities – to drive, then to run, then to walk, dress and even go to the toilet. Losing his sense of smell and taste took much of the colour and joy from his life.

In the last few months, Mark’s eyes began to fail. Since his stroke in January, he had occasionally had trouble with his vision. Sometimes it would seem to close in, as if he were about to faint; sometimes it would swim or dance. When that happened, he could not read, and even looking at another person could be like riding a fairground waltzer. With his eyes unruly, all he could do was lie in bed, listening to the radio, and increasingly that was how his time was spent.

Medieval and early modern ars moriendi books are religious books. For a modern, secular death, there is little to offer our apprehensive mortal souls in our last days, but there are ways that they could still model a good death for us. The illustrated version of the most popular late medieval book has a woodcut showing a jam-packed deathbed scene. At the centre is Moriens (“the dying one”) on his bed, but all round him are his friends and neighbours. As he dies, he opens his mouth and his soul comes out in the form of a naked child. Angels are on hand to receive his emerging soul, and a crowd of saints is observing this key moment. Whatever death was, for the medieval hero of the art of dying, it was not lonely.

His friends, the consolers, have a key role in comforting and reassuring him. They tell him that he is making a perfect end to his life. Medieval art-of-dying books are notable today for their lack of interest in explaining the death medically; they make no attempt to avoid or delay it. The Moriens character never dies of anything. His time is simply up, and he is about to die. That is all we need to know. None of his friends ever suggests that he should concentrate on getting better or that he still has many happy years ahead of him. This is, of course, a prerequisite for being able to talk about your own death with honesty and in detail.

Today, even those who are knowledgable and experienced in death often deny that it is coming. And while both Moriens and those around him know exactly what to expect, many of my generation do not. We fear that we will not cope with the pain, that we might conduct ourselves badly, swearing at the nurses or upsetting our families. We worry that death might happen to us when we are alone and helpless, or drug-addled and terrified. It is no wonder that Mark chose to keep control over the time and the manner of his death.

Mark sent his last text around midnight. He did not explain what he was doing: that would have meant I would either have had to call an ambulance and stop him, which I knew he did not want, or go to court for failing to prevent his death, or aiding and abetting suicide. I know it will make me cry, but I cannot stop imagining his last hours. Did he feel calm as he arranged the notes on his table? Was he frightened? What were his last thoughts, his last memories? Why was the radio switched off? Did he want to focus on his thoughts? Was he thinking ahead to my return, and planning that the silence from his bedroom would warn me what I might find in there?

The police officer who arrived that May morning needed me to identify the body. “Can you confirm that this man was Mark Pluciennik, your husband?” I knew this body so well, and yet it was so altered. It was not Mark, not really. It is just a kind of armature of him. As the illness progressed, layers of Mark came away. The joy and humour eroded, his thoughtful intelligence contracted to a kind of brutal core. Next, his physical vitality seeped out of him, and then, finally, all that survived was this pared-down essence. Just pain, and love and courage. And, now, not even that. Just memories. Stories.

At the start of our relationship, I was writing a book about the archaeology of emotion; Mark was working on a paper called “Archaeological narratives and other ways of telling”. The way we interpret and present the past, he told me, depends on sewing together the scraps that we have into stories. Just like fiction writers, we use plots, characters and events to make a narrative. Plots impose order and coherence upon the jumble of happenings that make a life, a century, an epoch.

And what story am I telling now, from this bit of far-more-recent past? This is the one I tell over and over: A man and a woman fell in love. Things were not always perfect. She could be sulky, resentful and jealous. He could be arrogant, thoughtless and unkind. But most of the time they loved each other. They cooked, watched TV, raised children, grumbled about work, went for walks, talked about the news, made plans and did the crossword. Normal things. One day the man began to feel strange. Many doctors examined him, and saw that parts of his brain were damaged. They did many tests, but none of them knew what was causing this damage, or what would stop it. More years passed. He felt worse and worse, and no cure could be found.

The woman was worried about him, and about the future. Gradually, she came to do alone all the things they had done together: working, cooking, caring for the children, looking after the house. She was wrung out and often bad tempered. He was both grateful and envious. It made him cruel sometimes. Illness did not bring out the best in either of them. The man saw how tired and anxious she had become, how much the children’s lives had changed. After a few years it seemed inevitable that this story would not have a happy ending. He might die. Or he might live on – blind, immobile and in pain.

One day, the children wanted to visit their cousins. And, although she felt a bit guilty, the woman really did want some time away from the sickness and the scratchiness, to spend a soft summer evening with her brother and sister-in-law, so she allowed herself to be persuaded. Accordingly, late one Friday afternoon, she set a tray with her husband’s meal and the things he would need for an evening alone and left the house. It was a warm, light evening in May, his favourite time of the year, and hers. The wife and children were giddy. They sang along with the car radio. Later, the children played in the evening sun, while their mother sat in her brother’s garden and talked and laughed and drank wine.

Later still, she went to sleep in her brother’s spare bed. At about midnight, her phone buzzed with an incoming text, but she was asleep and did not hear it. Meanwhile, at their home, her husband drank his coffee and ate his food. He listened to the radio. Then he wrote two letters and left them on the table by his bed. At midnight, he texted his wife to wish her goodnight, and to send love to the children. Then he took a fatal drug, washed down with some squash from the flask, and, turning off the radio, he closed his eyes, lost consciousness, and died.

As archaeologists, our knowledge of the past is always incomplete, patched together out of material that is never enough, not quite the right thing and usually the wrong shape. My personal memories are not so different. Already I have forgotten things. I am surprised sometimes by a photograph or a comment, and I think, “Oh, yes. That’s right. We did do that.” Trying to remember is like boxing smoke. Incongruously, although I cannot seem to order our years as a couple, I remember vividly his old, grey Volvo that we used to call the clown car because, every time you shut the door, some other part of it would drop off. I remember having contractions in a freezing hospital car park the night our son Adam was born, waiting next to that Volvo while he squirted the engine with WD40 so that it would start again in the morning. I remember one spring morning in Wales, when Rachel, my oldest child, must have been two, going for a walk near our house and coming into a wood which was radiantly, vibrantly blue with bluebells. I remember Rachel running into them in delight, and Mark and I, unusually for us, lost for words at the spectacle, just staring, open-mouthed.

It has taken me time to remember that there was not just the anger and frustration of those last months, but that there was also love. I must remember how exciting it felt at the start, and the solid ordinariness of it through the years of young children, through the Christmases and the summer holidays and the cups of tea in bed. There were moments of passion, of tenderness, of anger and regret, but mostly there were just days, months, years tumbling past, in a long, commonplace ordinary.

In an expression of colossal bravery, to keep me safe from prosecution, Mark died alone. His choice, but not his preference. In the medieval art-of-dying books, the dying person does not wait passively for things to happen to him. He is actively dying. Having a good death is within his control. At the time those books were written, suicide was a civil as well as a religious crime. But our modern ars moriendi must make some provision for control over the process of our own ending.

Suicide can be rational. Being dead is sometimes better than being alive. Sometimes we honour a life by letting it end. I do not feel guilty, but I do wish things had been different. I wish we had been more frank with each other. I wish Mark had been able to tell me what he planned to do, and I had been able to say goodbye properly. I wish I had sat beside him when he died. I wish I had held his hand as he dropped from consciousness, from pain, from life. I wish he had heard me say, “Thank you for your love. I am sorry for the times I failed you. Please forgive me. I forgive you for the times you failed me. You have done good things with your life. You are loved. You will be remembered. I will do my best to make sure the children grow up happy, strong and fulfilled, and honour your memory. We will talk about you all the time. You have been so brave. Thank you. I am sorry. We have had good times, haven’t we? We have loved each other, haven’t we? Do you remember the bluebells, Mark?” And I wish he had died remembering them, remembering us, astonished, transcendent, in the wood, with that saturated, radiant blue as far as we could see.

At about 9.15 on the morning of 7 May 2016, I came home and found my husband of two weeks, my partner of 18 years, dead in bed. Still, I go over and over the way that morning unfolded. I woke at my brother Ben’s house. Since I had left Mark alone overnight for the first time in months, and because he could not get his own breakfast or medication, I set off to drive home as soon as I was dressed and had drunk a cup of tea.

I texted Mark to say I was setting off, but I got no reply. Like the previous day, it was gloriously warm and sunny, and my drive along the empty A1 was easy and quick. I parked the car and walked up to the front door. I let myself in and shouted up, “Hello. I’m home!” No answer. “Mark?” I started up the stairs. It was quite silent. I had a sick, empty feeling, as though all the organs in my abdomen had suddenly dropped about a foot. I sort of knew, but I did not absolutely know. Not yet. I thought to myself, “This is the last moment before our world changes; these are the last steps in my old life.”

His bedroom door was open, as it usually was, so he could hear the sounds of the house, of the family. He found comfort in the swill and roll of the dishwasher, the muffled chat of the radio in the kitchen. But, really, I knew before I went into the room; before I took that last step out of our life together and into widowhood, I knew what had happened. I remember most of all how he looked in the bed, lying on his back, wearing a grey T-shirt, the yellow duvet pulled up to his chest. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack, his skin the colour of a drizzly sky. He was absolutely still. Both wholly Mark and wholly dead. Oh, Mark. Oh, darling.

My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. I am a professor of archaeology, specialising in mortuary and commemorative practices. I have written dozens of papers and several books about death – and how the relationship between the living and the dead changed between the late medieval period and the 20th century. I teach classes on the archaeology and history of death; I have travelled the world giving lectures on excavated burials and standing memorials. I can tell you about the history of cemeteries or the growth of cremation; or talk about the places where people disposed of dead bodies by pickling them in alcohol, exposing them to the birds and weather, or placing them inside living trees. A few years ago, I trained to be a humanist funeral celebrant.

Even though I spend much of my waking life thinking about dead bodies, I do not find it depressing or ghoulish. I love archaeology. I enjoy the fieldwork, I like teaching at the university, I like finding out new stuff. Most of all, I love trying to work out what you can say on the basis of incomplete and inadequate data. That process of inference is what archaeology really is. People think archaeology is the same as excavation, but that is just a small part of it. Excavation is one way of retrieving evidence, but there are others; the art of archaeology is in taking all those bits of evidence – things recovered from below ground, standing remains of structures, traces in the landscape, microscopic traces in soil, bone or pot – and thinking about what they might mean, how we can use them to tell a plausible story of the past.

The details vary according to anthropological or chronological context, but everybody wants a good death. Topping the late-medieval bestseller lists were how-to manuals written entirely with this end in mind – the ars moriendi, or art of dying handbook. These books describe idealised, perfect deaths. William Caxton published an English translation, The Arte and Crafte to Know Well to Dye, in 1490. Later, Thomas Becon would write an enormously long ars moriendi text called The Sicke Mannes Salve. Sixteenth-century Britons could not get enough of it, and it ran to 17 editions between 1560 and 1620.

It is basically a single deathbed scene. As he nears the end of his life, Epaphroditus experiences the disappearance, one by one, of his five senses. He asks his friends to prop him up in bed because, he says, “I begin to wax very faint, and my breath decreaseth and waxeth shorter.” Soon after, he tells his friends that he can no longer see, and then that, “As God hath taken away my sight so do my other senses decay.” Next, he claims to have lost the power of speech, though that does not stop him from uttering pious hopes and prayers for several more pages.

An undiagnosed neurological illness meant that Mark lost so much in the years, months and weeks leading to his death. Were his final minutes a shedding of the last senses that still remained available to him? One by one, the things that kept Mark anchored in the world had been taken from him. First it was his abilities – to drive, then to run, then to walk, dress and even go to the toilet. Losing his sense of smell and taste took much of the colour and joy from his life.

In the last few months, Mark’s eyes began to fail. Since his stroke in January, he had occasionally had trouble with his vision. Sometimes it would seem to close in, as if he were about to faint; sometimes it would swim or dance. When that happened, he could not read, and even looking at another person could be like riding a fairground waltzer. With his eyes unruly, all he could do was lie in bed, listening to the radio, and increasingly that was how his time was spent.

Medieval and early modern ars moriendi books are religious books. For a modern, secular death, there is little to offer our apprehensive mortal souls in our last days, but there are ways that they could still model a good death for us. The illustrated version of the most popular late medieval book has a woodcut showing a jam-packed deathbed scene. At the centre is Moriens (“the dying one”) on his bed, but all round him are his friends and neighbours. As he dies, he opens his mouth and his soul comes out in the form of a naked child. Angels are on hand to receive his emerging soul, and a crowd of saints is observing this key moment. Whatever death was, for the medieval hero of the art of dying, it was not lonely.

His friends, the consolers, have a key role in comforting and reassuring him. They tell him that he is making a perfect end to his life. Medieval art-of-dying books are notable today for their lack of interest in explaining the death medically; they make no attempt to avoid or delay it. The Moriens character never dies of anything. His time is simply up, and he is about to die. That is all we need to know. None of his friends ever suggests that he should concentrate on getting better or that he still has many happy years ahead of him. This is, of course, a prerequisite for being able to talk about your own death with honesty and in detail.

Today, even those who are knowledgable and experienced in death often deny that it is coming. And while both Moriens and those around him know exactly what to expect, many of my generation do not. We fear that we will not cope with the pain, that we might conduct ourselves badly, swearing at the nurses or upsetting our families. We worry that death might happen to us when we are alone and helpless, or drug-addled and terrified. It is no wonder that Mark chose to keep control over the time and the manner of his death.

Mark sent his last text around midnight. He did not explain what he was doing: that would have meant I would either have had to call an ambulance and stop him, which I knew he did not want, or go to court for failing to prevent his death, or aiding and abetting suicide. I know it will make me cry, but I cannot stop imagining his last hours. Did he feel calm as he arranged the notes on his table? Was he frightened? What were his last thoughts, his last memories? Why was the radio switched off? Did he want to focus on his thoughts? Was he thinking ahead to my return, and planning that the silence from his bedroom would warn me what I might find in there?

The police officer who arrived that May morning needed me to identify the body. “Can you confirm that this man was Mark Pluciennik, your husband?” I knew this body so well, and yet it was so altered. It was not Mark, not really. It is just a kind of armature of him. As the illness progressed, layers of Mark came away. The joy and humour eroded, his thoughtful intelligence contracted to a kind of brutal core. Next, his physical vitality seeped out of him, and then, finally, all that survived was this pared-down essence. Just pain, and love and courage. And, now, not even that. Just memories. Stories.

At the start of our relationship, I was writing a book about the archaeology of emotion; Mark was working on a paper called “Archaeological narratives and other ways of telling”. The way we interpret and present the past, he told me, depends on sewing together the scraps that we have into stories. Just like fiction writers, we use plots, characters and events to make a narrative. Plots impose order and coherence upon the jumble of happenings that make a life, a century, an epoch.

And what story am I telling now, from this bit of far-more-recent past? This is the one I tell over and over: A man and a woman fell in love. Things were not always perfect. She could be sulky, resentful and jealous. He could be arrogant, thoughtless and unkind. But most of the time they loved each other. They cooked, watched TV, raised children, grumbled about work, went for walks, talked about the news, made plans and did the crossword. Normal things. One day the man began to feel strange. Many doctors examined him, and saw that parts of his brain were damaged. They did many tests, but none of them knew what was causing this damage, or what would stop it. More years passed. He felt worse and worse, and no cure could be found.

The woman was worried about him, and about the future. Gradually, she came to do alone all the things they had done together: working, cooking, caring for the children, looking after the house. She was wrung out and often bad tempered. He was both grateful and envious. It made him cruel sometimes. Illness did not bring out the best in either of them. The man saw how tired and anxious she had become, how much the children’s lives had changed. After a few years it seemed inevitable that this story would not have a happy ending. He might die. Or he might live on – blind, immobile and in pain.

One day, the children wanted to visit their cousins. And, although she felt a bit guilty, the woman really did want some time away from the sickness and the scratchiness, to spend a soft summer evening with her brother and sister-in-law, so she allowed herself to be persuaded. Accordingly, late one Friday afternoon, she set a tray with her husband’s meal and the things he would need for an evening alone and left the house. It was a warm, light evening in May, his favourite time of the year, and hers. The wife and children were giddy. They sang along with the car radio. Later, the children played in the evening sun, while their mother sat in her brother’s garden and talked and laughed and drank wine.

Later still, she went to sleep in her brother’s spare bed. At about midnight, her phone buzzed with an incoming text, but she was asleep and did not hear it. Meanwhile, at their home, her husband drank his coffee and ate his food. He listened to the radio. Then he wrote two letters and left them on the table by his bed. At midnight, he texted his wife to wish her goodnight, and to send love to the children. Then he took a fatal drug, washed down with some squash from the flask, and, turning off the radio, he closed his eyes, lost consciousness, and died.

As archaeologists, our knowledge of the past is always incomplete, patched together out of material that is never enough, not quite the right thing and usually the wrong shape. My personal memories are not so different. Already I have forgotten things. I am surprised sometimes by a photograph or a comment, and I think, “Oh, yes. That’s right. We did do that.” Trying to remember is like boxing smoke. Incongruously, although I cannot seem to order our years as a couple, I remember vividly his old, grey Volvo that we used to call the clown car because, every time you shut the door, some other part of it would drop off. I remember having contractions in a freezing hospital car park the night our son Adam was born, waiting next to that Volvo while he squirted the engine with WD40 so that it would start again in the morning. I remember one spring morning in Wales, when Rachel, my oldest child, must have been two, going for a walk near our house and coming into a wood which was radiantly, vibrantly blue with bluebells. I remember Rachel running into them in delight, and Mark and I, unusually for us, lost for words at the spectacle, just staring, open-mouthed.

It has taken me time to remember that there was not just the anger and frustration of those last months, but that there was also love. I must remember how exciting it felt at the start, and the solid ordinariness of it through the years of young children, through the Christmases and the summer holidays and the cups of tea in bed. There were moments of passion, of tenderness, of anger and regret, but mostly there were just days, months, years tumbling past, in a long, commonplace ordinary.

In an expression of colossal bravery, to keep me safe from prosecution, Mark died alone. His choice, but not his preference. In the medieval art-of-dying books, the dying person does not wait passively for things to happen to him. He is actively dying. Having a good death is within his control. At the time those books were written, suicide was a civil as well as a religious crime. But our modern ars moriendi must make some provision for control over the process of our own ending.

Suicide can be rational. Being dead is sometimes better than being alive. Sometimes we honour a life by letting it end. I do not feel guilty, but I do wish things had been different. I wish we had been more frank with each other. I wish Mark had been able to tell me what he planned to do, and I had been able to say goodbye properly. I wish I had sat beside him when he died. I wish I had held his hand as he dropped from consciousness, from pain, from life. I wish he had heard me say, “Thank you for your love. I am sorry for the times I failed you. Please forgive me. I forgive you for the times you failed me. You have done good things with your life. You are loved. You will be remembered. I will do my best to make sure the children grow up happy, strong and fulfilled, and honour your memory. We will talk about you all the time. You have been so brave. Thank you. I am sorry. We have had good times, haven’t we? We have loved each other, haven’t we? Do you remember the bluebells, Mark?” And I wish he had died remembering them, remembering us, astonished, transcendent, in the wood, with that saturated, radiant blue as far as we could see.