How Come I'm Dead?

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

His “clients” were unable to ask the title question for themselves; so it was Judge Glen McDonald’s mission, as Vancouver Coroner from 1954 to 1980 and Supervisory Coroner for the province of British Columbia from 1969 to 1980, to ask it for them — and to make sure he got an answer.

His colorful memoirs have all the fascination of an inside look at a world most of us are happy to leave strictly to the professionals. Avoiding morbidity and gloom very successfully (considering the subject matter), the book demonstrates clearly how careful attention to the deaths of some members of society can lead to protective measures that will preserve the lives of others. Judge McDonald dealt with the deaths of the famous, the nameless, and the broad range between. His accounts cover both the press hoopla surrounding the sudden demise of playboy actor Errol Flynn, and the silent and tragic inevitability of the unmarked deaths of the homeless and destitute, so often found in vacant lots or cold hotel rooms; deaths caused by accident or by malice; death in all its guises.

McDonald’s story tends to lurch from first to third person narrative in an unsettling fashion, but it certainly succeeds in its purpose of providing a look at life and death from a (happily) unfamiliar perspective, one that holds the reader’s attention and that is (in one chapter, at least — that dealing with goings-on behind the scenes), definitely not for the squeamish. Illustrated with photographs.