Death
Writing obituaries can be strangely life-affirming
There’s nothing morbid about writing obituaries
Why we love requiems
Alexandra Coghlan on the enduring appeal of requiems
The trade in cadavers is rife with scandal
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
His son’s death may have inspired some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but he never recovered from the loss
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
A meditation on death
Gstaad I shoulda been a weatherman: no sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it…
The comfort of building your own coffin
The rise of ‘coffin clubs’
Children’s questions about death are consistently good fun
What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having…
Roman funerals had real ‘emotional intelligence’
Today’s funerals, featuring shiny black hearses and top hats, lack (we are assured) ‘emotional intelligence’. Colourful coffins featuring pictures of…
A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir…
Painful, funny — and with a brilliant twist: The Farewell reviewed
The Farewell is a quiet film that builds and builds and builds into a wonderful exploration of belonging, loss, family…
Remembering Tim Hoare – a man like no other
He was a Falstaff in his drinking and in his celebration of life, but his greatness lay in his friendships.…
The woman laid out in the coffin in front of us wasn’t Mum
The receptionist with brown lipstick showed my son and me into a faultless waiting room, whose centrepiece was a big…
How Captain Mainwaring lightened my mother’s dying days
On Saturday evening I showered, shaved and, prompted by a strange impulse, put on my going-out clothes. Then I cycled…
Why can’t my mother be allowed to die at home
As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my…
How an orphaned baby kudu gave solace to my grieving friend
Laikipia, Kenya On 5 April this year, my neighbour Torrie’s sister Vicki died during an operation in a Nairobi…
What my mother’s death means for Brexit
Considerate to the last, she had her order of service arranged in her mind. I sat close with my notebook.…
Banana leaf, wood-effect on knitted? Choosing my mother’s coffin
The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly…
My friend’s death taught me what Easter really means
The bravest thing I’ve ever seen was 93-year-old Albert’s decision to die and the days after in which he stuck…
My old horse was tough, ferocious and violent – and I loved her as much as she loved me
Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how…
![British poet Salena Godden presenter of Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4. [Photo: Roberto Ricciuti / Getty Images]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/12/Radio.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Listening to people talking about death can be strangely consoling
‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives…
Podcasts still have a long way to go to challenge the best of conventional radio
Here’s a thought. Matthew Bannister, former Radio 1 controller turned presenter of programmes such as Outlook on the World Service…
How hospices make you think differently about life
The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so…
An intense conversation about life, love and writing with Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself…
It is a sin to die in the Land of the Depraved
New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era…
A very British response to a death at a funeral
Something very odd occurred at a funeral I attended last week — somebody died. I don’t mean the person who…
