Death
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
Q. Almost a year ago I attended the funeral of my godfather — a bachelor and distant relation whom I…
La petite mort
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…
High life
The enforced boredom of lockdown has been replaced by a feeling of loss. My nephew by marriage, Hansie Schoenburg, died…
Letters
Hong Kong’s success Sir: Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are right to compare the UK’s Covid-19 response with Hong Kong’s…
Lessons from the dying
A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always…
The pain of forgetting
‘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…
Dying art
There’s nothing morbid about writing obituaries
Mourning glory
Alexandra Coghlan on the enduring appeal of requiems
Dealing in death
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
Grief fills the room up
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
High Life
Gstaad I shoulda been a weatherman: no sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it…
It’s your funeral
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.…
