Chat #18 - Lara
"I don’t see bodies. I see people"
Lara is an Anatomical Pathology Technologist (APT) who has been working in NHS hospital mortuaries for over 10 years, providing continued care of the deceased. She lives in Yorkshire with her partner, and tortie cat that she rescued from a basement at work. In her spare time she enjoys wandering around cemeteries, old churches and museums. Outside of being a walking stereotype, her other hobbies include aerial circus, learning Swedish and watching objectively terrible films with friends.
06/12/2025, 16:47 - Finbarre:
Hi Lara, thank you so much for joining me on Tarot DMs this World Month. I’m here with a mug of tea, a stack of tarot cards, and ready to go. Before we start, could you describe a little bit about what you do for your work? Because I’ve read about it, and I’m not entirely sure if I quite understand.
06/12/2025, 16:51 - Lara:
Hello. So yeah, I’m here as well with a mug of mulled wine after having quite a long day at work, funnily enough. So I’m an anatomical pathology technologist or APT for short. I’ll probably just say APT for the rest of this because it’s shorter.
Essentially, I work in a hospital mortuary, but as a job, we do work in what we call public mortuaries as well, which are mortuaries run by the local council, not affiliated with hospitals. It’s almost like another ward in the hospital is the way that I describe it.
So we are the staff who work in the mortuary as a ward in the hospital and our patients are the deceased patients in the hospital. We call them patients, by the way, not bodies or anything else.
Yeah, it’s our job is the day-to-day running of the mortuaries. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. We do the receipting and the releasing of patients to funeral directors. We do when families want to come and visit someone, we facilitate that. And then we also do the post-mortem work. So we assist with the post-mortems with the pathologists. That involves the evisceration and reconstruction of patients when they need a post-mortem examination. And yeah, I think that’s kind of about the long and short of it, really.
06/12/2025, 16:51 - Finbarre: Poets I know. Many of my friends are illustrators, writers and academics but what you bring to the world is something I have never known.
06/12/2025, 16:52 - Lara: I am so envious of people with artistic talents, as I have none! But I have so many friends in that world
06/12/2025, 16:54 - Finbarre:
I have so many questions to ask, but I’m going to wait for the cards to direct them.
I’m thinking, was it Six Feet Under that got you into this?
How does somebody wake up one morning and decide, this is the career path I would like to take?
What the actual day would be like if you were to just clock in and do whatever it is you do. Right. Okay. I’m going to send you the card of the month, which is The World card. And I’ll think of something from there.
Prepare to get a barrage of things I’d like to know!
06/12/2025, 16:54 - Finbarre:
06/12/2025, 16:58 - Lara:
That’s okay. I often get a lot of questions when people find out what I do for a living. And it either comes from a place of curiosity, just in general, from that aspect, or people just don’t know what I do. Thankfully, I love talking about my work, and what I do is my biggest passion.
The way that I got into it is I am of the generation of the Scully Effect. So I absolutely adored The X-Files and Dana Scully when I was younger. And I wanted to be Dana Scully. And that was being a forensic pathologist, basically. But, oh my God, I was a teenager, a young teenager, pre-GCSE things, and I was looking into what you have to do to become a forensic pathologist. You have to be a doctor to do that. I knew at that age that that’s not what I wanted to do at all.
So I kind of put all that aside and was like, well, that’s clearly not for me then. And it was only, like, to cut a very, very long story short, if you want the details, I’m more than happy to give you them. But to cut a long story short, when I was in Uni doing a degree that I ended up not really enjoying and realizing I didn’t want a career path in that either, I sort of revisited what mortuary work may look like for me. Like, if there was any way that I can access that. I stumbled upon a blog by a forensic pathologist based in the UK who detailed the same thing about, you know, how you become a forensic pathologist and the career that it takes. Like, the career path that you have to go on for it. And at the end, they just kind of offhandedly almost mentioned that if that didn’t sound like you wanted to do that, there was this career path.
Instead, there was this job called, like, anatomical pathology technologist that works in mortuaries and assists at postmortems and, like, sent a link to NHS jobs. Like, the descriptions of, like, you know, different career paths that you can work in the NHS.
I read that and it was just a complete light bulb moment of that’s what I want to do. That is it. You have just described exactly what it is.
To find out at that age that this job exists just absolutely blew my mind.
06/12/2025, 16:58 - Lara:
Before all that, I guess I was always into Egyptology and stuff when I was like a lot younger. And just speaking to various people sort of in this field or in death work in general, you do find that the Egyptology obsessed child to death care worker adult pipeline is straight and narrow. And I think so my interest in this field starts a lot earlier than that. So yeah, it’s been quite a journey.
06/12/2025, 17:02 - Finbarre:
Possibly your face when I reveal I haven’t seen the X Files. I KNOW.
06/12/2025, 17:02 - Lara: WHAT!!!!!???
06/12/2025, 17:03 - Lara: Ok, the episode that started it was Bad Blood. Season 5, episode 12. If nothing else, watch that!!!!
06/12/2025, 17:04 - Finbarre:
It is true I am so sorry! I have friends that have gone into medicine as you say purely because of the Scully Effect and I’ve not even seen… there’s supposed to be an incredible episode about a person that eats spleens or something. Apparently that’s a good one, oh and there’s supposed to be that wonderful episode called “Home”. No I can’t even put on a straight face, listener or reader please please don’t watch “Home” as far as I’m aware if you want to maintain your sanity.
Let’s go back to the card first of all, The World. It’s a final card of the Major Arcana it’s a card of fulfillment and integration. Yeah I’m going to bring some woo back into the science. Yeah, I know, but it represents something that is long awaited that’s been achieved so that is going to be the inspiration for my question to you.
06/12/2025, 17:04 - Finbarre:
Something I’d like to know is about the lasting legacy of your work. So how do you think compassionate mortuary care affects families and communities?
06/12/2025, 17:07 - Lara:
Okay, firstly, a quick one. The episode you’re looking for is called Tooms, and that is in season one of The X-Files, I believe. I may have to fact check that one. But it is incredible and terrifying. And it’s also, there’s another episode as well. I can’t quite remember what that one’s called. I may have to go have a quick Google about that one. But he comes back. Spoiler alert, sorry. But they are great episodes.
06/12/2025, 17:08 - Lara:
It’s interesting that the world is a card that’s related to long, longstanding sort of wish fulfillment, etc.
It actually took me 10 years before I managed to get a job in the mortuary from when I first sort of started actively looking when I was 19. And that is quite a common theme with people who work in this industry is so, so hard to break into.
So just, yeah, just the fact that that’s the card of the month is like very, very apt for my job, really.
06/12/2025, 17:09 - Lara:
Sorry, I have just fact-checked.
And the first episode that Tooms appears in is actually called Squeeze, which I think is a really, really early episode in Season One. But yeah, watch it. It’s brilliant.
06/12/2025, 17:12 - Lara:
Okay, now to answer the question, after doing some X-File related research, I think it’s something that people don’t really think about in the general population. They don’t really know what we do, and what our job is exactly.
In a way, we’re almost there to myth bust, in a way. People meet us, speak to us at one of the worst points in their lives. You never really know what their misconceptions are, but we do hear a lot when families come and see their people in our visiting suite and they come in and they’re scared because they expect something like they see on TV.
And I have a lot to say about how my job is portrayed on TV, by the way. And they’re expecting somebody to be pulled out of a fridge on a metal tray or something like that when they come and see someone. And it’s not like that at all.
To actually put a face, like a human face and personality, I guess, to the person who’s looking after your person in the mortuary is really helpful. And to know that that person is being taken care of and that there are humans behind this job, I think is very reassuring.
And, you know, there are many reasons why people may come to us and we don’t always know the stories of the people who are in our care. And, you know, some families have had awful times with their experience in healthcare or their person’s experience in healthcare.
And then it’s quite a weight for me to know that, like, I really don’t want to add to that bad experience and I’ve got to try and make this not worse. There’s no making things better, but it’s about making things not worse.
And if people can come out of their experience once they’ve met us with a feeling of, you know, sort of like, I don’t know, at least there’s someone in their journey that isn’t terrible, then that’s quite important.
But yeah, I think one of the things is that what we do and, you know, what services we provide and offer within hospitals and public mortuaries as well, just isn’t really known. And it’s just about that sort of advocacy of like, yeah, this is something that can be, I hesitate to say positive experience, but not a negative one.
06/12/2025, 17:14 - Lara:
Yeah, I think that the mortuary in general is a very sort of neglected area in healthcare and healthcare communication, I guess.
There’s never any good press that comes out about a mortuary.
It’s always seen as the hospital’s little secret.
The only time that we’re ever in the news, like, you know, publicly, is because something bad has happened. When good things happen or positive things happen, you just never really hear about it at all in the wider public or even within the hospital setting as well.
You know, we have like trust-wide emails and, you know, things like that. And you never sort of hear how well a family’s had, you know, in the sort of feedback kind of thing that, you know, the wards may receive in through your normal daily feedback channels.
We don’t really have that. Well, we don’t have the mechanism for, you know, getting feedback, but it’s just not something that people are aware of that things can, like, positive can happen down there.
06/12/2025, 17:19 - Finbarre:
You know, Lara, you’ve got me thinking that the only time I’ve ever considered a mortuary as existing in my life was when I was working on a IT service desk.
I received a telephone call that a hospital that we’re connected to had a flood. And mortuaries being mortuaries at the bottom of the building, they managed to get their temperature control system flooded.
Their freezers or refrigeration systems weren’t working. I don’t think I’ve tried to solve a ticket faster in my life because the possibilities of what could happen there still haunt me.
To discover more, we’re going to need a second tarot card.
06/12/2025, 17:20 - Finbarre: I’m going to shuffle the deck, let me know when to stop.
06/12/2025, 17:20 - Lara: Stop!
06/12/2025, 17:21 - Lara:
Oh my God, yeah, with your flooded fridge problem, that sounds like an absolute nightmare and I’m thinking of it obviously from my end and sort of how we would end up dealing with that. We are very well versed in how to deal with, you know, fridge breakdowns and stuff.
We have contingency plans, but from a flood, that sounds like that’s not like necessarily a quick fix. That will be such a headache from my point of view, so thank you for fixing that fast!
06/12/2025, 17:21 - Finbarre: I think the deck hear you talking about your 90s TV show of choice. You get....
06/12/2025, 17:21 - Finbarre:
06/12/2025, 17:22 - Lara:
AMAZING!
06/12/2025, 17:22 - Lara:
Also, I can’t help but think, are those, it looks like Christine Ricci in those cards, I guess. Definitely in The World, at least.
06/12/2025, 17:22 - Finbarre:
All right, give me a minute. I need to try and work out how to respectfully thread this card into this conversation. Okay, come on, Finbarre, you can do this.
06/12/2025, 17:23 - Finbarre:
06/12/2025, 17:24 - Lara:
Oh my God, I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention or didn’t look as to which deck you were using but yeah, that makes sense.
06/12/2025, 17:24 - Finbarre: If you or anyone reading this subscribes to TarotDMs.com you’ll be in the hat to win the deck at the end of the month!
06/12/2025, 17:26 - Finbarre:
Often the devil card represents bondage, temptation, shadow aspects of the self. It also represents contrast and it shines a light on what choices are available to us.
06/12/2025, 17:27 - Finbarre:
As your work brings you face to face with suffering, loss and despair, how do you confront those darker aspects? How do you protect yourself from emotional burnout?
06/12/2025, 17:27 - Finbarre: Christina Ricci asks the big and serious questions, it seems
06/12/2025, 17:29 - Lara:
It’s such a good question and it’s one that I don’t exactly know the answer to strictly. So I think part of it is that in a way, and there’s no way to, I guess, do this job if it’s going to be one that is going to destroy you.
It’s one that you’re going to take home with you. Obviously, you don’t really know how it’s going to affect you until you start doing it. So it’s like a catch-22 when you get started. It’s something that’s never actually really emotionally affected me in that way. And that’s not uncommon, I have to say. I don’t know if it’s, like I said, just the kind of people that are called to this work, because I do believe it really is a calling, that there’s almost a kind of resilience and sort of self-protectiveness there that enables that. In a way. Only those that can do, I guess.
06/12/2025, 17:31 - Lara:
So yeah, it’s something that I’ve thought a lot on over the years because it is one of the more sort of awkward questions that I get asked because there’s no way of really saying that “Oh no, I love my job and it doesn’t bother me”.
That doesn’t sound like you’re saying, you know, I don’t care that your person has died or it doesn’t bother me that death happens and I’m actually kind of glad that it happened or else I wouldn’t have a job.
That’s obviously not what I’m trying to say, but trying to put that succinctly in a way that doesn’t, you know, need someone to sit down and have a cup of tea and sit with you for about an hour while you explain, you know, your inner workings of your brain.
So I’ve never really been able to put it in very pithily, I guess.
06/12/2025, 17:32 - Lara:
I’m going to have to try here. So I think what it kind of boils down to is that the reality is: we are very, very separated from active grief. And we don’t have to break the news that someone has died. We don’t have to watch somebody die. We don’t have to support families in that very, very immediate grief. We don’t have that. And that in and of itself is very, very protective.
06/12/2025, 17:35 - Lara:
So the way that I think of it personally, I guess, I’m not sure if anyone else in this field does, but I certainly do, is that I don’t see the people that are in our care as “bodies”, quote unquote. They are people to me. And I just sort of figure that I’m meeting these people at this point in their life. This is who they are. And I don’t know anything about them before.
I think that’s just me accepting that this is who they are at this moment kind of thing. That’s how I’m able to do it. And that’s just the way that I think. I didn’t have to force myself to think that way. That is just what I think and feel. They are my patients. We are another ward on the hospital. And that’s just what I do. It’s a very sort of practical aspect. Like I said, a very Dana Scully way of thinking about it, I guess.
Yeah, this is who they are and this is my role in their life.
06/12/2025, 17:38 - Lara:
So, as a bit more of my background, I was raised Catholic. I’m not Catholic anymore. But one of the things that we are taught is that death is not the end of life, but it’s an event in life.
That’s obviously seen as from an individual perspective that when you die, you hopefully end up going to heaven and your life continues on eternal. And it’s actually kind of true just as a daily thing, isn’t it? That death is an event in life. People you know will die and then your life carries on one way or another.
And for me, it’s more literally, you know, this is my job. My job is that people die. And yeah, I’m not quite sure how my upbringing necessarily within Catholicism played into, you know, my very, very practical, I want to say, I don’t know… outlook on this. But yeah, I think that’s what it is. I look at this with a practicality.
06/12/2025, 17:41 - Lara:
That’s not to say that I haven’t had cases that stay with me. My main emotion that I feel, I guess, when I hear histories of some of the people that are in my care is actually more anger.
I see ways in which they have been maybe failed or let down by healthcare or by society. And you look at some things and go, this death didn’t need to happen. This shouldn’t have happened.
And it definitely sort of politicizes you if you weren’t already. One of the things that I care quite deeply about is maternal deaths, which is classed as any death of someone whilst they are pregnant or up to a year after they’ve given birth, no matter how the pregnancy ended.
There are vast, vast racial disparities and wealth and economic disparities in outcomes for pregnant people. And it’s something that I learned quite early on in my career because we specialized in maternal deaths in the place that I trained in.
When I was being taught about the cases, what the pathologist basically said, you know, what is one of the biggest indicators or factors in maternal deaths. And it’s race here in the UK. I mean, it’s the same in America as well. But in America, the biggest cause of death in pregnant people is actually murder, which is, yeah, quite something.
But over here, we have inquiries into maternal deaths that hopefully try and figure out, you know, patterns and ways to hopefully tackle some of the health inequalities, etc. To reduce that, that’s, I guess that’s the way that I focus in the way that things that we do in our job that can help people who are living in.
06/12/2025, 17:45 - Lara:
Also, I find it quite funny that as an ex-Catholic, the card that I pulled was the devil.
06/12/2025, 17:46 - Finbarre:
I don’t know about you, Lara, but many of my Catholic friends and family have many opinions and things to say about the devil.
I can hear the depth of commitment when you were speaking before to your calling and that passion that you have delivering dignified care to your patients really comes through. It must do to their families and those that remember them.
I’m just humbled that you’re sharing this with me and anyone else that’s either reading or listening to this. Thank you so much.
06/12/2025, 17:48 - Finbarre: Ready for your third card?
06/12/2025, 17:48 - Lara: Absolutely!
06/12/2025, 17:48 - Lara:
Like I said, I will talk all day about my job. I absolutely love it, but I think people really do need to know a bit more about what we do for sure. So I’m here for longer.
06/12/2025, 17:49 - Finbarre:
Lara, your last card was chosen by Helen Nesburg, who’s an illustrator, writer and muralist based in Portland. She pulled one from the deck and this is what she got.
06/12/2025, 17:50 - Finbarre:
06/12/2025, 17:50 - Finbarre: The Ace of Wands (but upside down)
06/12/2025, 17:50 - Lara: Ooh
06/12/2025, 17:51 - Finbarre: Disconnection! A temporary creative void! Now to thread that in....
06/12/2025, 17:52 - Finbarre:
I gazed into the eyes of Dana Scully, and now I have my inspiration. Possibly not the first time I’ve gazed at Gillian Anderson. But anyway, moving on.
Have you ever watched a TV series or film that’s tried to capture what a mortuary does and completely missed the point? What’s the most misguided or hilariously wrong portrayal you’ve ever seen?
06/12/2025, 17:54 - Lara:
Oh my gosh. Right. So this is going to be a little difficult to answer simply because since I started this job,
I find it very, very, very difficult to actually watch media like that because it just makes me so angry because people get it so wrong.
I did say earlier about the portrayals of my job in the media is something I have a lot of opinions on.
06/12/2025, 17:55 - Lara:
I think the most egregious one that I can talk about that admittedly I haven’t watched because it’s so bad, but I have read a lot about it, is Silent Witness.
It’s a British one, so I can comment a little bit more because it’s not really fair of me to describe what American shows are like because we work very, very differently.
I’m sure they’re all absolutely terrible portrayals as well, but particularly Silent Witness is not great.
06/12/2025, 17:57 - Finbarre:
Pictured: just your average Thursday?
06/12/2025, 17:59 - Lara:
Oh my God, that’s exactly the series I was thinking about. I’ve just Googled it. I think it’s series 26 of Silent Witness. But basically, it’s just, I mean, for one, I think it’s my job specifically as an APT isn’t really represented in media like this. It’s always about the pathologist and they’re the ones that do everything.
And they do and they don’t. Forensic pathology is a bit different. They do do more than your sort of everyday histopathologists. But yeah, it’s just like they do everything and we’re not there. And you may see an extra or something with an arm in shot or something.
I do think Silent Witness tries to include us a little bit more. But yeah, we’re almost like completely missing. Again, I’ve not actually watched Silent Witness because it makes me so angry. So if anyone wants to correct me that we are represented in there, then absolutely, please do that. I still won’t watch it because it will make me really mad.
06/12/2025, 18:00 - Lara:
In general, as tropes, what really, really, really make me angry, the idea of pathologists and even forensic pathologists working in their own clothes, not wearing scrubs, being able to turn up in the mortuary whenever they want.
Generally, the doing of, oftentimes they’re criminal, so it’s forensic postmortems. It’s just the pathologist in the room. Actual forensic postmortems, you have got a ton of police calling around as well.
You’ve got, you know, SOCO, scenes of crime officers, if that’s what they’re still called. Sorry, not quite sure their exact terminology now.
You know, taking bits of evidence, you have photographers. It’s not just the pathologist. But in these shows, you would think that it just is. It’s just them. They’re the star of the show.
06/12/2025, 18:01 - Lara:
The way that it shows people, like the front of the pathologist going out and, you know, they have guns or they’re, you know, just getting out in the action, being part of the investigation of things. And that does not happen.
This is probably part of the reason why, you know, with the Dana Scully that I wanted to be a pathologist because it did look quite exciting.
It’s not actually that exciting at all. You turn up at all hours of the day to do an examination and then leave onto your next job.
06/12/2025, 18:01 - Lara:
Another one, obviously there’s the whole, you know, you pull someone out on a tray and show a family them in like the fridge room. That does not happen.
06/12/2025, 18:03 - Finbarre:
I’m taking a look on Reddit and apparently there’s one character in Silent Witness that somehow has been shoehorned into the sort of detective workflow, even though they’re a mortuary assistant.
And they’re getting stressed out about the case, so they have to lie down on a mortuary table and stare at the ceiling to think things through. Yeah, my parents really like this show.
06/12/2025, 18:03 - Lara:
Another one is, you know, the whole people just seem to be laying in post-mortem rooms waiting to be examined. And that doesn’t happen.
I was re-watching Broadchurch recently and there’s a scene where the person who’s been murdered is sort of lying out on a PM room table. And it’s clear from what you can see obviously they’re covered like sort of quite a lot with a sheet.
But the pathologist is being asked, you know, sort of like provisional sort of cause of death or whatever and you can see the body lying in the background that they haven’t had a post-mortem examination.
Like you can see that they’ve not and they don’t have the incisions that they would have. They don’t, you know, they’ve not been examined.
And, you know, the whole talking about, oh, it’s, yeah, they, you know, they’ve been, you know, X, Y, Z. This is the cause of death. And you’re like, how do you know? You’ve not even looked. You don’t know.
06/12/2025, 18:04 - Lara:
Yeah, no. Oh, God. Oh, no. Yeah, no, that’s not what happens. That is not what happens at all.
Oh, my God. Yeah, I’m never going to watch this. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
06/12/2025, 18:04 - Lara:
Just as a really sort of dull one, I guess, is how fast results take. You hear people talking all the time about, you know, oh, we’ve got the toxicology results back like the next day.
And no, no, toxicology hasn’t even been put in a machine yet. It’s probably not even been like sent to the lab yet. That’s great. I want to know what universe they live in, that they can get their toxic results back so fast. That’s not happening.
06/12/2025, 18:06 - Lara:
What’s quite funny about these things is that there are ostensibly, what’s the term? I can’t quite remember what the term is, but like a technical advisor. I think that’s it.
And I think actually someone in my very, very first job that I worked at used to be like an advisor on Silent Witness specifically, where you’re consulted about the realism aspect of a show, what they would do or things like that.
And they stopped because they’re just like, you don’t listen to us. And it’s just an embarrassment. This is not a representation of my job. So I’m just going to step away.
That is actually something that I have done. I did it once for a film where I came in as the advisor on the mortuary scenes. And it is just a little bit of a joke.
It was good money, but it’s not something you do because, you know, there’s going to be any kind of accuracy. It just doesn’t happen. That needs to happen at like the writing stage, not just the filming.
06/12/2025, 18:07 - Lara:
I think, yeah, part of it, a lot of it just doesn’t make good telly because the things that we do, it is actually quite dull compared to what happens on the TV. It’s not completely exciting. Conversely, there are some things that if you did show it on TV, like the actual things that happen, people probably wouldn’t believe it.
I don’t know if that’s just because people think what is on TV must be a true reflection of what happens and therefore that inaccurate portrayal would be so unbelievable because it’s not what they’re used to. Or if they are just, yeah, it’s so unusual as to what they would imagine that actually does happen. They just wouldn’t believe it.
06/12/2025, 18:07 - Finbarre:
I think I’ll stick with my guilty pleasure of... *ahem* iZombie. I stand by my choices. Love it.
06/12/2025, 18:08 - Lara: Haha I have never seen that!
06/12/2025, 18:08 - Finbarre: WHAT
06/12/2025, 18:08 - Lara: Also never seen 6 Feet Under
06/12/2025, 18:09 - Finbarre: I’ll do you a deal. I’ll see an episode of The X-Files and you try this?
06/12/2025, 18:09 - Finbarre: (I suspect I’ll do better out of this, iZombie is glorious unabashed TV trash)
06/12/2025, 18:10 - Lara:
06/12/2025, 18:10 - Finbarre: Do you happen to have a deck of tarot cards anywhere nearby?
06/12/2025, 18:10 - Lara: I DO
06/12/2025, 18:11 - Lara:
06/12/2025, 18:11 - Finbarre:
Well, that is brilliant because we have 77 cards that could potentially be the Guest card. Now, of course, The World won’t count because that’s the one that everyone will get. So I’d like you to give those a shuffle, produce one, and let me know what you’ve got. If you could take a picture of that even better.
06/12/2025, 18:12 - Lara:
So this is the is it AG Muller tarot cards they’re all in French. They were actually given to me by my mum she had them as like I don’t know a youngster I guess and I remember playing with them when I was a kid not really obviously knowing what tarot cards were exactly and she gave them to me so I’ve had these for quite a while.
06/12/2025, 18:13 - Lara:
06/12/2025, 18:16 - Finbarre:
You’ve got me thinking back to my GCSE French, and I’m trying to remember what that would be. Is it something like Dix de Coupe? Possibly. Ten of Cups. It’s the card of the happily ever after so I think somebody’s going to be quite pleased to get that one.
06/12/2025, 18:17 - Lara:
Quite disappointed that I didn’t pull the death card, to be honest. The last time that I did a random pick of a tarot card, it was actually a friend’s birthday and she had a tarot deck and it was literally the card that I pulled out first, which I was so proud of.
06/12/2025, 18:18 - Lara:
As an aside, I do actually have a Death and Judgment card design, like tattooed on me, one on each leg.
I know that Death isn’t, you know, literal. It’s actually quite a nice, like good card.
That was my reasoning behind it anyway. The same with Judgment. I do know what they mean and I didn’t just get them because, you know, they were cool or anything like that. And they were based off a friend of mine’s own designs with cats.
I will have to try and get a picture of them and send them over.
06/12/2025, 18:20 - Finbarre:
Now, the Death cat I can all too easily picture, because let’s face it, most felines have brought some form of early demise to furry animals or our feathered friends, but the idea of a Judgement cat? I can only think of Ceiling Cat from the early 2000s.
06/12/2025, 18:21 - Lara: Oh, my cat is full of judgement
06/12/2025, 18:21 - Finbarre:
*judges*
06/12/2025, 18:22 - Lara:
My cat (Ripley), very judgemental
06/12/2025, 18:25 - Lara:
06/12/2025, 18:25 - Lara:
06/12/2025, 18:26 - Lara: Had to dive into the depths of my photo albums for those! That’s when they were freshly done
06/12/2025, 18:26 - Finbarre:
The ink and detail on those is so crisp and there is a touch of Pratchett to the Death card there.
06/12/2025, 18:27 - Lara:
Yeah, I love that interpretation of it. That it’s, like, a cat, of course, would be, like, Death’s companion. Yeah, I’m not actually sure if Pratchett was her inspiration from it, like, for the cards. But, yeah, no, I really, really like that it’s not an obvious depiction of, like, the Death tarot. It’s just, yeah, Death having a little cuddle with their cat.
06/12/2025, 18:27 - Finbarre:
That honking great eyeball ring of yours looks like you would place it on a table and it would follow you around the room or possibly contains deadly poison.
06/12/2025, 18:28 - Lara:
You know what, that picture was taken so long ago and I completely forgot I had that ring. I think I’ve still got it somewhere, but I don’t really wear it anymore. Maybe we should bring it back.
06/12/2025, 18:29 - Finbarre:
I was thinking the same just a few interviews ago when I was talking about one of those jointed goth 90s rings that I used to have.
The kind that you would wear when you had your long black coat and you were desperately trying to be like somebody from The Matrix.
And I’ve just paused to remember quite how long ago The Matrix came out.
Nope, moving on!
Lara, thank you so much for joining me on Tarot DMs. I’m astonished and gobsmacked with my head blown about what it is that you do for your work.
I know every day is a school day and I feel like there is so much more that could be talked about on this. I’d love to come back to it. And yeah, I now understand just a little bit of the world of an anatomical pathology technologist.
06/12/2025, 18:30 - Finbarre:
Now your tea must be long drunk. What plans do you have for the rest of the evening?
06/12/2025, 18:31 - Lara:
I don’t know. I think I’m just going to chill out watching a film. Me and my partner can never really decide on what to watch. It’s probably just something that we’ve seen before. We were going to watch Commando before I started this interview. So I think we’re going to go down and watch that. And I have got a giant tiramisu to eat that I bought at the Christmas market earlier on in town. So I’m going to do that really.
06/12/2025, 18:31 - Lara:
And of course, at some point, I’m going to have to watch an episode of iZombie!