Death

Writing obituaries can be strangely life-affirming

In my line of work I sometimes owe a cock to Asclepius. The ancient Greeks believed that a sacrificial offering to Asclepius, the god of good health, could buy you time. Perhaps it worked in the case of Boris Johnson. On the night he was taken into intensive care, I had the digital team of the Times breathing down my neck. They wanted to know if I, the paper’s obituaries editor, had an obit ready to go straight up online, ahead of the print version. I was up until midnight making sure we had, updating and recasting our existing one, trying to get the tone right. The cock may have

Why we love requiems

At some point during the 20th century death disappeared. The dying were discreetly removed from our communities and homes, taken to hospitals with short memories and wipe-clean walls. Mourning blacks faded before vanishing altogether; the elaborate funeral monuments of the 19th century shrugged off curlicues and cherubs and arranged themselves into unobtrusive, apologetic sobriety. Coffins — gauchely literal — gave way to the more tasteful euphemism of the ash-filled urn. Only concert halls bucked the trend. Suppressed from everyday life and language, death found a different outlet. How many choral societies or symphony choruses today go a year without performing a requiem mass? How often do Classic FM or Radio

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 find his interpretative dances punctuating a number of his lectures, which go by such arresting titles as ‘150 Years of the Human Corpse in American History in Under 15 Minutes with Jaunty Background Music’ and ‘Abusing the Corpse Even More: Understanding Necrophilia Laws in the USA — Now with more Necro! And more Philia!’ (Wisconsin and Ohio are, according to Troyer’s eccentric looking and always fascinating website, ‘two states that just keep giving and giving when it comes to American necrophilia cases’.) Troyer’s budding stand-up career has taken a couple

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 young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality. Her latest novel returns to this pre-occupation with the undiscovered country. In it she sets out to tell the imagined story of the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who perished at the age of 11, four years before his father wrote the play that would share his dead son’s name — in Elizabethan

A meditation on death

Gstaad   I shoulda been a weatherman: no sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it came down non-stop. But then it rained, so everything’s hunky-dory. Older rich people who don’t ski are relieved that it’s stopped; younger types who do indulge are over the moon that it’s snowed at all. Happy, happy Gstaad… but not really; the coronavirus news has some scared out of their wits. In fact, this alpine village is beginning to feel like Der Tod in Venedig, or Death in Venice for non-German speakers. The great South African doubles specialist Frew McMillan, now the best tennis commentator on TV, used to call

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 toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them is to hope beyond hope that this will be the year for you, the year that your not-very-good book will become a bestseller and buy you everything you want and need, and that no one will notice its manifest flaws until it’s far too late. Or maybe not; because every year a few decent titles

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 favourite musicians, leopard print hearses and burials in yurts will apparently correct this sad deficiency. The Romans might well have disagreed. Cremation and interment took place outside the boundaries of Rome (dead bodies were considered a polluting force — contrast the Christian view). The less well-off could for a fee join funerary clubs, meeting regularly to dine together, and have a niche in a highly decorated underground chamber reserved for the urn containing their ashes. Those wealthy enough to afford funerary monuments, featuring lengthy epitaphs and portraits of the deceased,

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 of France since the war: each year of the author’s life is evoked in a collage of memories, images and historical fragments. Apart from a handful of photographs, in which Ernaux is the dispassionately observed ‘she’, the self is erased and in its place an ambiguous ‘we’ narrates the flow of years and the slippage of time. In I Remain in Darkness, the ‘I’ is everywhere, yet it is still a treacherous word. In this work of shocking honesty and intimacy, Ernaux bears witness to her mother’s final years of

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 love, crab vs lobster, and hiding feelings, even though it may be tough to hide yours and you’ll shed a tear or two. I know I did. It is written and directed by Lulu Wang, who was born in Beijing but emigrated with her family to America when she was six, and it is loosely a memoir. The film opens in Changchun, a city in China’s northeast, with an elderly woman being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given maybe three months to live. This is Nai Nai (Zhao

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. Like his closest friend Nick Scott, who left us two and a half years ago, he roamed the world making friends and being as generous to them as a fairy godfather. The years, with all their disappointments, teach us caution, but Tim Hoare remained reckless to the end. Here he is in a high life column from 15 years ago: We hit a hurricane while sailing off the Riviera last week, a hurricane called Tim Hoare. I have never in my long life met anyone quite like him. The words,

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 colour photograph of out-of-focus lavender florets. A couplet written underneath said: I’m the colourful leaves when autumn comes around And the pure white snow that blankets the ground. Had we made an appointment, she asked. We understood that it wasn’t necessary, we said, and that we could view the body ‘at any time within normal business hours’. She wrestled with her thoughts for a moment, then said she would have to get a man to come over from Torquay to help lift her out of the fridge. ‘Can we help?’

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 round to the nursing home. The door of room 33 was ajar and she was fast asleep, mouth open, brow furrowed, as if she were trying to make sense of it all. The electric motor-powered mattress was raised and she was sitting up rather than lying, her head lolling towards the darkening window. On the bed table was a box of man-size tissues, a TV remote, a little pink sponge on a stick for sucking liquid out of, and a baby’s plastic drinking beaker in which her tea had gone

Low life | 4 July 2019

As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my sister, the next NHS workers arrived from all directions and removed my mother from her house to a nursing home. It was like the dramatic conclusion to an undercover ‘sting’ operation. They came streaming in through the front door laughing and joking. To avoid doing anything silly or controversial, I removed myself from the scene. While my mother was being carried out of her front door, a diplomatic mission was dispatched to offer me a confection of emollient explanations. This consisted of a community nurse and an occupational therapist. They

Wild life | 27 June 2019

Laikipia, Kenya   On 5 April this year, my neighbour Torrie’s sister Vicki died during an operation in a Nairobi hospital. Torrie, who is the livestock manager on the next-door ranch of Loisaba, adored her and was terribly sad, as was Don, her partner for 40 years. To me, Torrie resembles a thin Dylan Thomas who has been left to bake in the tropical sun for decades. He spends his days out in the heat, caring for 4,000 head of cattle, 500 sheep and goats and 150 camels — and he does his job very well, losing few animals. On the evening of Good Friday, exactly a fortnight after his

Low life | 30 May 2019

Considerate to the last, she had her order of service arranged in her mind. I sat close with my notebook. She didn’t want a eulogy, she said, but she is definite about the hymns and readings. To kick off, she would like that old Russian roof-raiser ‘How Great Thou Art’. Then, ‘Lord, For the Years Your Love Has  Kept and Guided’. And for the big finish: ‘In Christ Alone (My Hope Is Found)’. If there is to be a psalm, she would like number 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ Lately there’s been a funeral a week in the village church.

Low life | 23 May 2019

The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A friend had told her, she said, that the Co-op do a version called a ‘Simple Funeral’ for less than £2,000. Please would I look it up on the internet for her? The state-funded carer had been in and out already and she was washed and dressed and sitting in her electric recliner, wet hair combed back like a teddy boy, and in her eyes you could see her will burning brightly. I, on the other hand, had slept long and profoundly and was not

The true cross

The bravest thing I’ve ever seen was 93-year-old Albert’s decision to die and the days after in which he stuck to his resolve and sank away from consciousness, like a swimmer turning tail and just diving down into the dark. Albert was not religious, but I’m writing this now because though I’ve been Catholic for a decade, it was only after his final week, in the spring of last year, that I began to understand Easter and the Passion of Christ. I first met Albert when fate decided to call my bluff. For years I’d bored on to my husband about the need for a scheme to put locals in

Real life | 31 January 2019

Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how to make an exit. She knew how to do most things, having lived 35 years entirely on her own terms. The builder boyfriend and I stood speechless in the field afterwards, marooned in that strange moonlight. Then the other two horses, standing by the round bale a few feet away, did something I shall never forget. Seconds after she passed, Darcy and Grace put their noses together and breathed. Perhaps they felt her spirit leaving, perhaps they wanted to comfort each other. Either way, they were perfectly silent, touching faces

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

Last suppers

You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness, that sense that someone is talking to you, and you alone. In fact, if anything, headphones take away from radio’s ability to reach out to the isolated and the lonely, to create that connection between you, the listener, and that someone else, the person behind the mic. With headphones the voice gets inside your head, but it’s not like having a conversation. That USP also explains why listening in the car works so well, creating a companionship while driving alone along a road empty of human contact, surrounded by fast-moving