Death becomes her | 6 December 2018

‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives meaning to life and to be able to imagine your own death should make you try harder to be a better person. Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4 (produced by Cecile Wright) is not a programme for the faint-hearted. Godden, a poet, novelist and musician, faces with robust clarity what many of us would prefer to distract ourselves from thinking about. She argues that Death is much more likely to be a woman; not the usual caricature of a hooded male figure carrying a sickle. She’s that invisible woman who can be found anywhere and everywhere: the careworn mother sitting beside us on the bus, or the cleaner in the hospital corridor we walk past and don’t notice. She lives among us in different guises; that’s the point. Death really is part of life. When we use different words to anaesthetise its meaning, set it apart from us, then it becomes terrifying. But, says a doctor interviewed by Godden who has sat with many people on the brink of death, ‘it’s not actually that difficult to be dead; it’s much more difficult to be alive’.

Godden visits a Death Café where people gather to drink tea, eat cake, and be up front about a subject that has become since Victorian times almost a taboo, something impolite or socially inept to raise in conversation. There are so many ways not to say it, to hide behind euphemisms and words without meaning: she passed away, or even more obtuse, she passed on. Stranger still is when we say she lost her fight with cancer, she battled with depression, as if she had a choice, as if this isn’t what was meant to happen.