Viewing the body after bereavement due to a traumatic death: qualitative study in the UK

To make sure there had been no mistake

Some respondents said that they had wanted to identify the body to make sure there had been no mistake. Rachel’s son, Dave, died in Iraq in a bomb explosion. When his body arrived back in England, the coroner’s officer asked her if she could help with identification. Rachel could identify him from his tattoos. She wanted to make sure that it really was her son’s body:

• Rachel: First thing the following morning, we went up there, because I had to identify the body, and obviously he had a couple of tattoos, so he was quite easy to identify and she asked me what the tattoo was, and I told her. And she obviously had his passport with them, and she showed me the picture in the passport and asked me, “Was that my son?”

• Interviewer: Was this the coroner’s officer?

• Rachel: Yes it was. And I asked her, she had obviously been involved in cleaning him up, because she said she had been involved in that, and I did ask her, “Would I recognise him?” And she said, “No, I don’t think you will.” And that was a bit of a, a shock because she said, “I don’t think, he doesn’t look like he does on that passport,” is what her words were. And then I went in to identify the body.

• Interviewer: Were you on your own?

• Rachel: Yes. Yeah my husband and my daughter didn’t want to go in. And they never did go in. So, they didn’t want to.

• Interviewer: Was it the right thing for you to go and see him?

• Rachel: Most definitely, yes, yes, I had to make sure that that was my son, because you know, they might have made a mistake.

To care for the dead

People often said that they wanted to reach their dead relative as quickly as possible to see if there was anything that they could do or to make sure their dead relative was “alright.” Some families had to wait a day or more before seeing the body because the coroner wanted forensic evidence undisturbed before the postmortem examination. Often the police officer or the coroner’s officer insisted on observing the viewing, again for forensic reasons. Delays and lack of privacy could be distressing. When describing events that happened immediately after the death, those who wanted to care for the dead invariably used their relative’s name or talked about “him” or “her” rather than “the body” or “it.” A man with schizophrenia stabbed Jayne’s husband in an underground station. After Jon died in hospital, Jayne said that she talked to him, reassuring him that he was not completely on his own.

• Jayne: And when they took me into Jon, where Jon was laid out, you know, he was in a room on his own and I think my, my over-riding feeling was that I didn’t want Jon to be frightened (…). I know it’s going to sound a bit silly, but I think the over-riding feeling was that I wanted to share, I can’t say share what he was experiencing but be there with him so that he wasn’t on his own. So I talked to him a lot, and I reassured him that he wasn’t on his own, and sang to him.

Mothers in particular described wanting to retain their role as a caring parent. After Elizabeth’s daughter, Marni, had died in a car accident, the police told her that Marni had “not survived,” but she wanted to reach her daughter quickly:

• Elizabeth: I just wanted to get to her straightaway because I felt that there was something I could do, you know, that’s what every mother feels, isn’t it, you can always do something to make it better (…).

• Interviewer: And was that the right thing for you to do to go and see her?

• Elizabeth: Yes, definitely, definitely. I, yes I couldn’t wait to get to her.

Pat’s son had died one and a half years ago when his motorbike hit a car. She was upset because delays had occurred before she could reach him and because the coroner’s officer did not allow her to be alone with her son.

• Pat: It was eight hours before I was able to see him, and I wished that it had been a shorter period of time. I think, as his mother, I wanted to be with him, and of course we want to be with our, our children through their important experiences. (…) But of course the coroner’s officer, and I guess it’s a rule of some sort, but she came into the place with me and was standing on the other side of a glass, a small glass screen where she could see me the whole time. So I wasn’t allowed to be with Matthew, with my son on my own. And I am sorry about that and I don’t understand why it is that a mother cannot be with her child on her own if that’s what she wishes. I don’t understand why I could not have washed him, I could not have dressed him, I could not have looked after him (…) it feels like the organisation, the state, whatever it is, the police authorities, had taken my son and were doing with him what they felt best to do. And I was suddenly an outsider and not able to do things for my son (…) It felt as if he was somebody else’s property and I had to ask permission to go and see him. And I had to be observed whilst I did.

Both Elizabeth and Pat’s accounts suggests that after their children died their bodies had not lost their social identity. Pat talks about people wanting to be with “their children through their important experiences” (although few parents expect their child to pre-decease them). Both Turner and Howarth explain why boundaries between the living and the dead may seem blurred.26 27 Turner argues that “consciousness also involves embodiment. I both have and am a body.”

Margaret’s daughter hanged herself in prison. Margaret wanted to get there as quickly as possible. She did not want to wait for the funeral director to make the body look presentable. Her account is interesting because it seems that she feared that her daughter’s spirit had not left the body—that “lingering energy” was still around.

• Margaret: Then coroner’s officer said, “We can’t stop you, we can’t prevent because that’s your right. But we would strongly advise that you wait until the funeral director has seen to your daughter before you see her.” And I can remember saying, “Well she’s my daughter, she doesn’t need to look pretty, I need to hold her.” (…) I was terrified that she might still be lingering around her body in a confused state because of the suddenness of the death.

• Interviewer: Hmm.

• Margaret: I really do believe that that’s the least auspicious way to die. You know, like at the moment at death that you’re in this pain and confusion and …

• Interviewer: Hmm.

• Margaret: … on your own. And so I needed to get there so they could shift the energy on for her, if it was still lingering.

Margaret wanted to make sure her daughter was “warm” for the funeral, so she bought a coat with a fur lining in which to dress her daughter’s body. This act suggests that, to Margaret, her daughter remained very much a person and that her body retained its social meaning after death.24

To say goodbye

Helen’s daughter, Charlotte, died when she took an overdose of heroin. Helen said that it was important that she saw Charlotte after she died so that she could say goodbye:

• Helen: I felt at the time, and I still feel, that it was the most important thing that I needed to do [see Charlotte] (…). I would’ve regretted for the rest of my life if I hadn’t have done that. (…) I sat next to Charlotte for, I don’t remember, maybe 15 minutes, and I spoke to her. I think it, it was more important than at the funeral, saying goodbye actually, because she, I could see her.

Imagined images might be worse

Marion’s husband killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning in 1996. She went to the mortuary to identify his body. At first she did not recognise her husband because the body bore no resemblance to the man she remembered. Despite this traumatic experience, she returned to view his body on two occasions with her four children, aged between 10 and 22.

• Interviewer: And looking back, was it the right decision, to give the children that choice?

• Marion: I think so. I don’t remember asking them if they wanted to [see the body]. I remember them telling me they wanted to. I don’t know whether I’d have had the courage to ask them to be honest, but they both said, “Where is he? What’s happening to him and what does he look like?” And then the older, the middle one saying, “Well I want to see him.” And then the other one of course said, “Well I do as well.” [laugh] Not to be left out. I know my, my parents particularly were absolutely horrified that I’d allowed them to do that. With the benefit of hindsight I would do it again. It would never occur to me now not to. Afterwards I thought, “Oh I shouldn’t have done that. The trauma of them seeing him like that,” but maybe the trauma of what they would have imagined would have been worse.

A sense of duty or an obligation

In some religious traditions there is a duty to wash the body, or there is an open coffin before or during the funeral. After Kavita’s brother died by suicide (jumping), her father helped to wash and dress the body, according to Hindu tradition. Kavita saw her brother’s body when it was in an open coffin at home.

• Kavita: My dad was very helpful in, in terms of sorting my brother’s body out and washing and getting the clothes … all these sort of things.

• Interviewer: Is this a Hindu tradition, washing the body?

• Kavita: Washing the body and dressing the body in a new … I think it’s a new outfit (…). And I just remember my dad coming home from, from bathing my brother, coming home and saying, oh, he started talking about his hand and his foot that had been broken. And obviously that kind of stuck in my mind too.

• Interviewer: Hmm.

• Kavita: We did see that actually because we had an open coffin in the house, that’s also a cultural thing.

Religious tradition may not be the reason for this sense of obligation. Amanda’s husband identified their son, Lori. Amanda did not see Lori immediately because she had never seen a dead body before and she said she felt frightened. However, four days later she decided to view Lori’s body, partly because she said she “owed it to him.”

• Interviewer: Did you have to go to identify his body?

• Amanda: My husband chose to do that. I did see Lori when he was in the, the casket, (…) I didn’t go and see him [to do the identification] in that I was actually quite frightened (…). I am pleased I went, because that way I, I can never lie to myself that he’s not dead. I felt I owed it to him [crying].

As noted earlier, the boundaries between the living and the dead are often unclear. People may invest the dead body with continued social meaning.24 Baglow suggests that “the family, in claiming the corpse of a family member, is actually fulfilling an obligation to that corpse, rather than asserting rights of ‘ownership’ over it.”28 Amanda’s account, above, suggests this sense of obligation.

Patricia’s husband, Andrew, died in a fume-filled car. She felt it was important that she rather than anyone else identified him because it was a way of “bringing him back into the family” and because she felt it was right, even though she also described it as one of the worst things she had ever had to do:

• Patricia: One of the first things I said to the police officer was, “How, why, where, when?” And, and then I said, “I must go to him.” [The officer said], “Oh, well, we can get somebody else to identify him. You don’t have to do it.” And I said, “No, no, no, it must be me.” (…)We don’t know if he died before midnight or after midnight, but it will have been dark, cold, alone, away from his family, and I felt it was so important that I went to identify him because it was like bringing him back into the family. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do in my life. It was not an experience I would wish on anybody. But I know it was the right thing that I did it and not somebody else.

Relieved to see the dead person at peace

Some, particularly those who had lost a relative through suicide, said that they were relieved to see their loved one looking peaceful after all the stress or unhappiness they had experienced before their death. Susan X’s reaction to seeing the body of her son, Barry, is an example of this:

• Susan: One consolation for me was that Barry looked so peaceful, like all the anger had gone, all the stress, the worry. He really did look lovely, and he looked at peace and I think that helps a lot, when you see them like that. You know, and for me, also, I didn’t have to worry what he was going through.

Accepting the reality

Viewing sometimes helped people to accept the reality of the death. Sarah’s husband, Russell, died in a hospital operating theatre after a road crash. Initially, she did not want to see him after he died, but on reflection she said that it was important that she had seen her husband in the hospital because until then she had not believed that he was dead:

• Sarah: The fact that having actually seen him dead is the reality check that makes you realise, “No this is the real world, he has gone.” (…) It’s part of being able to believe that he is dead because if I hadn’t seen him I think the being able to believe he is dead would have been much harder.

Mixed reactions

Some people said that at first they found the appearance of the dead body upsetting or reported that they had mixed reactions. Linda, for example, was upset when she first saw her daughter’s body because she had expected the body to look pinker. However, when it had “sunk in that the body was not going to look the same” she decided to return several times to make sure her daughter was “OK”:

• Linda: And when we got out of the funeral director’s, I said to my husband, “How could you say she looked nice? She looked awful. Didn’t, didn’t look like her at all.” And he said, “Well, what was you expecting her to look like?” And I said, “Well, I was expecting her to look pink, like pinker, and like more like when she was alive.” And he just said, “Well she’s not alive.”

• Interviewer: Would you recommend to other people that they didn’t go and see their loved one after they’d died?

• Linda: No, because I went after that. I kind of, when he said that it kind of sunk in that, you know, she wasn’t going to look the same. But we did go and see her quite a few times after that. Yeah.

• Interviewer: And was that the right thing to do?

• Linda: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, we went in [um] we took some things in, took some [um] photos and things like that for her (…) But I wanted to go and make sure that she was OK really.

Martin’s wife, Steph, died when a bus hit her while she waited on the pavement. He went to the hospital to identify his wife, and was shocked to find that her body was so cold. Talking about the body, he said that “it wasn’t Steph … she had already gone.” Viewing his wife’s body did not compare with the shock of witnessing her fatal accident.

• Martin: Her face, from the mouth up to her nose, was black and blue. (…) I think that the tyre had gone over her face basically, and I just held her hand and I was absolutely shocked at how cold it was (…).

• Interviewer: Would you rather have not gone?

• Martin: No, it’s not affected me actually, it hasn’t, it hasn’t affected me that much. I don’t have nightmares about it (…)

• Interviewer: But, looking back on it, would you have rather somebody else had identified her, would you rather not gone to see her?

• Martin: I wouldn’t, well I mean I’d had that shock of seeing her under the bus, nothing will ever compare to that (…).and it [the body] wasn’t Steph to me, she’d already gone. She’d already gone, you know, she was dead and this was just something that I wanted to do, I wanted to be involved as much as I could, in all the legal things.

Marcus identified his fiancée, Louise, after a man had stabbed her to death. He wanted to see her again eight weeks later, before her cremation, so that he could say goodbye. Looking back, he said that he was pleased that he had seen her face, in spite of the bruising, but he wished the funeral director had prepared him better.

• Marcus: Louise’s face was very badly bruised, and it was so many different colours. And her hair was sort of matted. They tried their best to make her look like we remembered her. But it didn’t … it wasn’t her (…). If you can imagine this is after a number of weeks, almost months, she was a lot of different colours. She was black, green, brown, purple. And I kissed her on the forehead, and, and said goodbye that way. So for me it was…

• Interviewer: What would you’ve liked the funeral director to have said?

• Marcus: I guess in a way it would’ve been good if he’d said, “She’s not going to look how you remember so please take that into consideration,” rather than just let me in. I suppose in, in looking back I might’ve known what she was going to look like. I’m not, I’m not silly or stupid. But I thought she might look a bit more, I don’t know, like how she used to look asleep. But she didn’t.

• Interviewer: Are you glad you saw her?

• Marcus: I wouldn’t change that for the world. I’m pleased I saw her. And I’m pleased in a way I could only see her face and not all the brutality that had happened to her.

Jenny’s husband, David, jumped to his death. She went to see him in the hospital mortuary. She said that she “knew instinctively” that it was the right thing to see his body and that, although she felt distressed when she saw him, she also felt comforted. She did not see his injuries because most of his body was covered when she got there.

• Jenny: And I did go and see his body. Again that’s something that I absolutely, utterly had to do and spent, I think, about the best part of an hour there with him. And that was both upsetting and comforting. So I talked to the coroner a little bit. I knew that he [David] had internal injuries, but I didn’t see that. I just saw his face and his hand (…) But for me it was definitely right to go and see his body.

Erykah also reported mixed reactions after she saw her brother in an open coffin the night before his funeral. She was ambivalent about seeing him because blood started to flow from his neck as the body thawed.

• Interviewer: So was it good for the family to have an open coffin with him in the house?

• Erykah: Yes, yes. It was a bit strange, because I examined him, it was really bizarre, it was good [having an open coffin], but I don’t know if I’d choose that again because his wound, he got shot in the neck. He got shot eight times, nine times he got shot (…) but they shot him in his neck at close range, and because he’d been brought out of the fridge. I don’t know why this was but the wound was still bleeding, I think it was because he was thawing out, so his shirt, blood started to show up in the shirt, which was a bit weird, you know?

Erykah found the sight of seeping blood “bizarre.” Changes in the body after death can cause alarm and distaste, not least because in our society blood, mucus, and excreta are viewed as the body’s most dangerous polluting products.4

Regrets about seeing the body

Sally deeply regretted having to view her mother’s body after she died in a fire. A police officer asked Sally and her brother to go to the hospital ward to identify her mother’s body; her brother initially offered to do it, but when he could not recognise the body Sally reluctantly agreed to do so.

• Sally: So then they asked us to identify her, and I said I can’t, because they said she’d had black soot all going in her mouth and she didn’t look particularly, and I said, “I can’t do it,” so he [my brother] went in but he, he couldn’t recognise her. He said, “I can’t, I don’t, it doesn’t look like Mum, that’s not Mum.”

• Interviewer: Aah.

• Sally: So I had to go in to formally ID her, because he couldn’t ID her.

• Interviewer: Oh no.

• Sally: Because he said it looked nothing like her.

• Interviewer: That must’ve been awful.

• Sally: So, yes, so I had to, I saw her and I knew it was her and I just literally, one second and then, because I just thought I can’t have that look, that thought, in my head all the time of her. And I think that was probably the worst part, I think of the whole scenario actually, was actually seeing her. I wish I hadn’t done that, that was the worst experience of it was actually, and I don’t, I, personally I’d never do that, I’d avoid seeing any dead body because I think that was awful.

Once in the funeral parlour, Sally’s mother’s body was embalmed. Other members of the family wanted to view the body so Sally paid a hairdresser to do her mother’s hair. She also bought makeup so that the mortician could make her mother look better. Both Sally and her brother returned to the funeral parlour to view her mother’s body once more. Sally said that she decided to view the body again because she wanted to erase the horrible memories she had of her mother’s soot covered face. Her brother felt comforted by what he saw, but Sally did not:

• Sally: No, none of it helped. Because, you know, they done her hair, but it’s not how she had her hair. They done her makeup but it’s not how she does her makeup. You know they, I knew what colour she wore, and I said, “She always wore makeup. She always made an effort with her hair and her makeup, always made an effort,” so, but it wasn’t like, she, but she just didn’t look like her. She looked really hard and it just looked awful, it was awful. Didn’t like it (…) It wasn’t any better. That’s why I’ve got her photograph and I just look at that, and I say, “That’s how I’ll remember her.”

Angela regretted viewing the body of her friend who was badly bruised having been stabbed to death. Angela said that she should not have seen “the body” because she could not recognise it and it felt alien.

• Angela: …that’s one thing I probably shouldn’t have done.

• Interviewer: Why?

• Angela: Because doing that, it didn’t prepare me, I’ve seen dead people before, you know [um], but she just wasn’t the woman I knew, I didn’t recognise this person in front of me whatsoever. [Um] she was bruised, she was, and I just thought, I kind of felt dead inside, I just kind of felt like, “Oh who is this, this is not my friend.” (…) I could not recognise the body in front of me. It was the wrong thing for me to do because I was just looking at this person, thinking, “Who are you?” It felt like a bit like an alien had invaded somebody’s body; do you know what I mean? It just, I couldn’t, you know, it just did not look like [my friend].

The accounts given by Sally and Angela differed from many others in this analysis in that they described regret about seeing the body.29 In both cases the bodies were damaged and hard to recognise, and in Sally’s case she had viewed her mother’s body only reluctantly (that is, she had not truly chosen to see the body). Some of the distress might have been avoided if Sally’s mother had been identified by another means (such as dental records) and if Angela, in common with some of those with mixed reactions, had been better prepared for her friend’s appearance.