Death
Eccentric, artist and storyteller: in memory of my mother Doreen Sanders
Indian Ocean coast ‘I love you’ became just ‘love’, and that was the last word Mum was able to say…
Trauma has become as American as apple pie
Gstaad Lord Belhaven and Stenton, a wonderful man and the quintessential English gentleman, died at 93 just before the end…
Spectacular and mind-expanding: Tantra at the British Museum reviewed
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
My Aunt Beryl’s zinc-lined trunk revealed extraordinary family secrets
Bexhill-on-Sea My Aunt Beryl taught me to love books and paintings. When I’m at a loose end in London, lonely,…
The pagan rites of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to cancer, #RestInPower immediately trended. The ACLU, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, actress Reese Witherspoon and the ostensibly…
Dear Mary: how can I avoid my friend’s awful favourite restaurant?
Q. Almost a year ago I attended the funeral of my godfather — a bachelor and distant relation whom I…
Why people have sex in graveyards
The oldest churchyard in Torquay is being used by people openly having sex and sunbathing nude in broad daylight. This…
Europe's 'second wave' has fizzled out
Has the Covid ‘second wave’ already run out of steam? On 9 July, just when Britain was reopening the hospitality…
In memory of the man who never slept
The enforced boredom of lockdown has been replaced by a feeling of loss. My nephew by marriage, Hansie Schoenburg, died…
Letters: Did Bristol really want to see Colston fall?
Hong Kong’s success Sir: Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are right to compare the UK’s Covid-19 response with Hong Kong’s…
The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness
A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always…
How I finally came to terms with my sister’s death
‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of…
And end to decent dying
From 22 March 1986: They used to say that war is the ruin of serious soldiering. Too much disorder, too…
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…
