Beyond wordless
David Aaronovitch tells a tale in today’s Times which seems to speak volumes about, uh, attitudes to death, or families, or Britishness or… something, such that I thought I must share it with you. The background is that the Aaronovich family dog, a Kerry Blue, has been diagnosed with cancer and will die soon. When […]
When death is no longer the worst thing that can happen to you
It’s not the worthy efforts of the members of the Dying Matters coalition that have raised awareness of the need to talk about death and dying. What’s actually got more and more of us talking is our personal experiences of the difficult and protracted end-of-life suffering of members of our families. Alongside twenty-first century death […]
What taught Chuck about death?
We like Chuck Lakin at the GFG. We’ve blogged about him here and here. Here’s his reply to the question ‘When did you begin learning about death?’ The precipitating incident was the death of my own father. This was in 1979 and he was home for the last six week of his life, and I’m […]
Chowing down with the antecedents
Debate about attitudes to death, funerals and the commemoration of the dead has largely been colonised by a section of the liberally-educated chattering sector of the middle class. They’re the ones most likely to opinionate about this stuff; they’re the ones who like to think think they can get their heads around it. They are intellectual […]
That bloody box
“This was a funeral that celebrated unity. Like all other funerals. That bloody box: the awful finality: the dreadful unduckable certainty that life has to come to an end. So of course it was the same today. We knew she was dead, and all of us, no matter how little interest we take in politics, […]
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
Pace the spirit of the age, a celebration-of-life funeral does not fit everybody. Nasty, bad, horrible people die, too. We refrain from holding celebration-of-death funerals for them, preferring instead to curtail, allude and acknowledge, to a degree, often disguising our meaning between the lines. Difficult people die, too. They often mean different things to different […]
May we all unlearn our fear of death
There’s a good review of the Natural Death Handbook, fifth edition, in the Huffington post. Here are some extracts: The Natural Death Centre, the charity behind The Natural Death Handbook, exists to help re-open the dialogue about life’s end, offering a combination of practical advice, how-tos, go-tos, and reflections that inspire, comfort and challenge. At the heart of […]
Fight to the death
One of the things that’s changed is that ever so many people end up falling into the clutches of technology at the end of their lives. Something happens to them and the emergency response is to admit them to hospital – because the traditional view is that doctors are in a fight against death – […]
Is it politic to target terror of death?
According to the BBC, the UK is falling off the pace in the international race to live forever. There may be a measure of national shame here. In a table of 18 countries we stand at #11 behind Greece. Spain is top. Spaniards enjoy an average of 70.9 years of healthy life. Finland is bottom. Finns […]
Weighing the End of Life
ONE weekend last year, we asked our vet how we would know when it was time to put down Byron, our elderly dog. Byron was 14, half blind, partly deaf, with dementia, arthritis and an enlarged prostate. He often walked into walls, stood staring vacantly with his tail down, and had begun wandering and whining […]
