Avoiding conversations about death doesn’t help us when we’re faced with the reality

Where living things are, death follows,” Hayley Campbell wrote for Voices last Thursday.

Campbell is the author of All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade, and she eloquently explores our discomfort around addressing the subject of death, highlighting how we are so desperate not to “bring the mood down” that there’s never really a “good” time to talk about this absolute inevitability.

At the weekend, Aisha Rimi wrote about attending the funeral of her grandmother in Nigeria, via a WhatsApp video call. This bereavement occurred during lockdown, and Rimi and her sisters stayed in the UK, feeling left out of the grieving process due to geographical distance.

Death is all around us, and at this strange point in our history, perhaps it feels particularly close. In the UK alone, over 165,000 people have lost their lives to Covid. The forthcoming public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic may shed some light on why and how the UK was the first country in Europe to pass 150,000 Covid deaths.

In Ukraine, some areas under intense bombardment have been forced to bury their dead in unceremonious mass graves. More than 350,000 people have been killed over the past 10 years of bloody war in Syria, and 370,000 in Yemen. We expect to see even greater loss of life due to the effects of the climate crisis.

As I travel up north to my family, to be with them as we face our own bereavement, I feel the ache of anticipatory grief. I oscillate between fury, confusion, helplessness, horror – and numbness, too.

The British tend to be quite bad at addressing death. Maybe it’s a hangover of our famed stiff upper lip, an inclination to shy away from the subject because death brings with it such a multitude of uncomfortable emotions – but it’s ultimately unhelpful and doesn’t serve us when we are face-to-face with the reality of end of life care, or of sudden tragedy.

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Many of us struggle with language around death, choosing to avoid the topic altogether, offering unwanted platitudes or even skirting around people who are grieving due to feelings of awkwardness or discomfort.

Death will always be with us. Acknowledging the pain and sadness of loss with respectful kindness that doesn’t assume an existing spiritual belief needs to be normalised as a response.

Yours,

Harriet Williamson

Voices commissioning editor