All in a day's work?

Or is it? I don’t know if it’s just my bad luck or if I’m just being hypersensitive, but every programme I work on at the moment seems to be connected with death. In the month after Mum died, I had to work on the entire first series of Poltergeist The Legacy, with virtually every episode full of coffins, ghosts and ghouls, and when this had finished, Six Feet Under came my way. Six Feet Under is one of my absolute all-time favourite television series, but of course any show that is about a family who lives and works in a funeral home is going to grate a little close to the bone on occasions. Last week, I had to review the subtitles for Death In Gaza, an extremely disturbing, saddening and horrific documentary about the martyrdom of suicide bombers and the murder of a British cameraman by Israeli troops, which contained numerous scenes of parents hysterical over the corpses of their massacred sons and daughters and children picking up rotting and burnt-out flesh in the streets.

And even if I’m allocated a programme which seems outwardly not to contain any morbid subject matter, you can guarantee I’ll get the episode with a funeral, a joke about a cancer sufferer, or the fall-out after a grisly murder. Peepshow? Jez’s uncle dies in a hospice. Martin Chuzzlewit? Mr Chuffey is inconsolable after his master’s sudden demise, whilst Mr Mould the undertaker rubs his hands in delight at the extravagant burial he has been asked to prepare. Drop The Dead Donkey? Newsreader Sally’s granny dies. The Smoking Room? An off-screen character has a stroke in the frozen food section in Asda. Between The Lines? An eighteen-year-old schoolboy hangs himself in a police cell.

I wonder if other people who are grieving find that going to work helps them to get on with their lives, to busy themselves with the mundane in order to make them forget their pain. I suppose everyone is likely to be vulnerable to insensitive comments or jokes in poor taste from callous or unthinking colleagues and people who work in the emergency services will of course face the tragedies of others on a daily basis. But I suppose I must be fairly unique in that what seems like a harmless occupation can actually turn out to be quite so personal and raw. Others who are bereaved can simply change channel or turn the television off when scenes which upset them appear: I can’t, because they are my livelihood. I work to live – I certainly don’t live to work – and now it seems I have to work to watch yet more people die.
REBECCA