Letting go
Rhoda Partridge took up painting when she was 70. Now 90 she’s still hard at it. Her spirited life has also embraced scuba diving, gliding and ceramics. In an interview in this month’s Oldie magazine she is asked: Do you find that after 70 years you live in the shadow of death? She replies: Oh […]
One man’s date with death
You saw the news that Christopher Hitchens has cancer? I suppose we all wonder how we would feel and conduct ourselves were the news to be broken to us, so there is something compelling about listening to and observing someone else for whom the dread summons has come. Here are some extracts from what Hitchens […]
The sun that bids us rest is waking
It’s going to be interesting to track the development of, both, the right to die and its concomitant, the responsibility to die. Old age doesn’t just become physically unendurable, it gets to be economically unaffordable, too. The darkness is increasingly going to fall at our behest. Choosing the moment will be straightforward enough. Humans live […]
A party for a parting
Jonathan posted an interesting thought the other day: “if no-one had portrayed the pseudovictoriana we associate with funerals, can you think of anyone who would have invented it for themselves?.” It raises the question: if we were to start again with a clean sheet, how would we do them? It’s a big question. Do funerals […]
The D-Word
There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need […]
What does dying feel like? 2
No one writes about death and funerals with greater wisdom, wit or feel for words than the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch. Is that point of view disputable? I think not. But go on, dispute it all the same. Where healthy debate is concerned, there is harmony only in discord. Following on from my last post, here’s, if you […]
What does dying feel like?
For a while, now, I have been looking for someone to tell me what dying feels like. Tricky topic, I know, all the best witnesses being dead. Silly thing to do, friends have told me, don’t waste your time. Dr Geoffrey Garret, onetime senior Home Office pathologist, tells us what dying looks like: Life has […]
