Category Archives: Death and dying

Life after death: how the pandemic has transformed our psychic landscape | Jacqueline Rose

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Modern society has largely exiled death to the outskirts of existence, but Covid-19 has forced us all to confront it. Our relationship to the planet, each other and time itself can never be the same again

We have been asked to write about the future, the afterlife of the pandemic, but the future can never be told. This at least was the view of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was commissioned to edit a series of essays for the Guardian in 1921, as the world was rebuilding after the first world war. The future is “fluctuating, vague and uncertain”, he wrote later, at a time when the mass unemployment of the 1930s had upended all confidence, the first stage on a road to international disaster that could, and could not, be foreseen. “The senses in which I am using the term [uncertain],” he said, “is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest 20 years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”

This may always be the case, but the pandemic has brought this truth so brutally into our lives that it threatens to crush the best hopes of the heart, which always look beyond the present. We are being robbed of the illusion that we can predict what will happen in the space of a second, a minute, an hour or a day. From one moment to the next, the pandemic seems to turn and point its finger at anyone, even at those who believed they were safely immune. The distribution of the virus and vaccination programme in different countries has been cruelly unequal, but as long as Covid remains a global presence, waves of increasing severity will be possible anywhere and at any moment in time. The most deadly pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu at the end of the first world war, went through wave after wave and lasted for nearly four years. Across the world, people are desperate to feel they have turned a corner, that an end is in sight, only to be faced with a future that seems to be retreating like a vanishing horizon, a shadow, a blur. Nobody knows, with any degree of confidence, what will happen next. Anyone claiming to do so is a fraud.

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What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert

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An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past

One night in the early 1990s, at a dinner party at his home in Paris, Stéphane Bourgoin, an author and bookseller then of no particular renown, began to hold forth on the matter of serial killing. The topic was, at the time, quite novel. As a cultural trope, the string of mysterious homicides had of course been a fixture around the world since at least the time of Jack the Ripper, and the French more specifically had been acquainted with the idea since as early as the 15th century, when the nobleman Gilles de Rais was found to have kidnapped, tortured and ritualistically murdered nearly 150 young children. But these people had not been understood as “serial killers”. That phrase, and the notion that such criminals were a breed apart, impelled by a special, sexualised depravity, really entered into the popular imagination only in the 1970s, and then mostly in the US, where the FBI had established a unit of so-called “profilers” to catch them. The serial killer was not yet a cultural vogue in France, much less the cliche it was already becoming elsewhere. Bourgoin’s guests were barely familiar with the concept at all. They listened, as millions of other French-speakers would listen in the decades to come, horrified, nauseated and rapt.

Bourgoin told his invitees of the FBI programme, of the traits of the typical killer, and of some of the more awful American specimens. “We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, who was among Bourgoin’s guests that night, recalled recently. Kehringer was then in her 20s, starting out as a television producer. “I started asking him all sorts of questions,” she said, “and the more he spoke, the more I thought to myself: ‘We’ve got to do a film!’”

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A moment that changed me: how a ‘death knock’ taught me about grief, respect and truth

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It was my first day on a local paper when I went to visit a bereaved family with a seasoned reporter. It shaped all the values I took into my journalistic career

I was 19 when, in September 1987, I got a fortnight’s work experience on my local free newspaper, the Kingston Guardian, in south-west London. It was a small but dedicated team of reporters operating out of an office in Twickenham and they were incredibly generous, taking me under their collective wing and sending me out on all kinds of assignments. By the end of the two weeks, I had a handful of bylined pieces and had written my first investigative feature – a tug-of-love dog ownership dispute over a whippet. But the moment that changed me came on the very first day, on a story that I didn’t even write.

The team had suggested I go out in the evening with an older reporter on a “death knock” – going to visit a family after a death. They didn’t call it a death knock and it wasn’t one of those notorious tabloid visits, when a reporter turns up out of the blue and confronts a bereaved family. It had been agreed in advance with the parents of the deceased, a 17-year-old schoolboy who had died in a car accident, not long after passing his driving test. It was the kind of awful, accidental death that happens regularly, all over the country.

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Nearly two-thirds of those who died young in 2019 were male, research finds

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Boys and young men neglected in efforts to tackle mortality in 10- to 24-year-olds, Lancet report says, with a failure to address violence, substance use and accidents

Boys and men are more likely than women to die as teenagers or young adults, according to new research that warns the gender gap in mortality rates for that age group is widening in many countries.

In 2019, boys and young men aged 10 to 24 accounted for nearly two-thirds (61%) of all global deaths.

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A moment that changed me: ‘My mother taught me to face impossible tasks – and so I carried the coffin at her funeral’

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From an early age, she encouraged me to be strong, physically and mentally. Those gifts helped me through the day we buried her

My mum was a PE teacher and coach. One of her early gifts was to help me feel like a physically capable female. For the couple of years before she died, my body had taken a battering, with illness and major surgery, then pregnancy and the aftermath, so I wasn’t feeling at all hale. Carrying a coffin is not something a woman necessarily plans to do – usually men perform this task; assumed to be stronger bearers. It’s a frightening, demanding duty.

But I wanted to do it for Mum. I wanted to be involved practically with the process of grief, and “put my hands under the stone”. My cousin R, an upland sheep farmer and incredible woman, walked at the front with me. What the congregation in church saw first as we entered the building was not a typical sight – a beautiful white wool coffin carried in by women. The coffin was chosen by my dad, my brother and me. It was constructed from local fleece and covered with flowers, a visual antidote to fear and darkness.

For the interment, we had the catastrophic challenges of storm Desmond’s tail – a Met Office red weather warning, flooding and damage in the village cemetery, debris everywhere. The entire burial was in question. Throughout, the undertakers were superb, calm, stewarding, agents of a remarkable humanity. Drains were unblocked; the grave was dug, the burial would go ahead, they insisted, the coffin taken via a high passable pathway, between the oldest headstones.

It’s an old Westmorland tradition that mourners walk in a cortege from church to cemetery behind the hearse, and everyone did. The scene was like something from an oil painting; the formal procession through a drenched Lakeland village, the gales dying out and black clouds breaking apart, rays of brilliant, gilded light. People had fought to get to the funeral – train lines and roads were shut and there were long delays, blockages, power cuts. Those who tried all made it, or sent representatives from as far afield as India and the US.

It was an incredible experience – a good disturbance in the heart. I’m haunted, but not traumatically, and a few years later wrote a short story about it all called Sudden Traveller. It is the only story I cannot read out in public.

Regardless of the epic December weather, there were absent people who might have come in support – of me, if not my mother. At the time, my marriage was breaking down and my daughter was only 16 months old. Mum had been sick with cancer for a year and I lived six hours away from her and Dad. I was in the eye of a personal storm, too.

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‘Despicable’: Sydney police stop Muslim mourners from watching funerals from cars

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NSW police say people were in breach of public health orders as four men arrested at Rookwood cemetery

In Islam, it is essential that the dead are buried as soon as possible. The body is washed, prayed over, taken to the cemetery and buried, with some small prayer or invocation said by the grave.

It is usually a quick process, sometimes drawn out by lingering family, but one that can be shortened in times of difficulty, such as in a pandemic.

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‘My theatre went dark’: Amanda Kloots on loving and losing actor Nick Cordero

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The Broadway favourite, who died of complications from Covid last summer, is remembered by his wife and co-star

When you’re on Broadway and suddenly find out that your show is closing, you feel this wave of sadness. As a cast member, there was nothing you could have done to save it. You didn’t write the script; you didn’t call the shots. You just had to show up, and smile, and dance, and perform, and give it your all every day. Your cast has become like your family, the theatre like your home, and your dressing room like your own personal bedroom in that house, your space filled with photos, cards, and memories. After your last show, you have to take that all down, pack everything into a box, and walk out of the theatre as it goes dark.

Related: Nick Cordero: Broadway star dies aged 41 of coronavirus complications

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Lionel Shriver: ‘A chosen death is an authorial act – I’ve never cared for stories that end on ellipses’

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The author’s new novel centres around an elderly couple bound in a suicide pact. Watching her parents age, the subject of dying with dignity is never far from her mind

For those of us with elderly parents, countless news broadcasts of bewildered residents cruelly exiled in care homes during this pandemic have been especially raw. Even so, I can’t be the only one who’s thought reflexively: “That will never be me.”

My friend Jolanta in Brooklyn has made that vow official. Put through quite the medical ringer herself, she tended to a difficult mother through a drawn-out decline. Not long ago, she declared to me fiercely that she’d no interest in living beyond the age of 80. Dead smart and not given to whimsy, Jolanta was already about 60, the very point at which old age starts to seem like something that might actually happen. I couldn’t help but wonder, should she indeed turn 80, will she take matters into her own hands – or not?

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‘You love me? I can’t take that to the bank’: Johnny Vegas on money, fame and grief

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Lockdown and the loss of both parents have transformed the entertainer. He talks about the disappointments of TV, outgrowing his comic persona – and his move into the glamping business


I remember the buzz around Johnny Vegas at the Edinburgh fringe in 1997. Everyone knew a star was being born – but a star of what, exactly? No one had ever seen anything quite like this overweight northerner, screaming and sobbing at his audience, raging at life’s injustices – then breaking off for another bout at his potter’s wheel. Was this comedy, ceramics or a Lancastrian on the verge of a breakdown?

But the oddity – that defiance of categories – couldn’t sustain a career. A handful of years after becoming the first newcomer to be nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, Vegas went mainstream as a man with a monkey sidekick in an ad campaign for the pay-TV service ITV Digital. People shouted “moonkeh” (St Helens accent not optional) at him in the street. He became – and remains – a well-loved household name, albeit for a brand of (hoarse, boozy) comedy that part-obscures what made him extraordinary in the first place.

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‘Rainbow, leopard print or pink’: Prince Philip’s Land Rover shows rise in alternative hearses

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Transportation to one’s own funeral is becoming more personalised, as more seek ‘something different’

The send-off for Prince Philip will be a royal funeral like no other, not least because his coffin will be carried in a bespoke Land Rover hearse he helped to design himself.

It’s a break from royal tradition – but his choice is not uncommon. Alternative hearses have become increasingly popular in recent years as people opt for more personalised funerals.

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Letting go: my battle to help my parents die a good death

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My parents were determined to avoid heroic medical interventions in their dying days, even before the pandemic. Why wasn’t anybody listening?

Almost as soon as the word Covid is coined, my parents update their “advance decision” documents. They’re constantly adjusting them, fine-tuning their wishes for future medical treatment. “Like a dowager with an elaborate will,” I tease them, blowing the ink dry on yet another signature.

When they first completed their advance decision document, 20 years ago, they were mostly concerned with not being resuscitated should they have a stroke, perhaps while shopping in the market or cycling home. Now, aged 84 and 82 and debilitated by multiple illnesses, they’ve had to give up their bikes and those hopes of a dramatic end. “We look like the old people road sign,” says my mum, bent over her walking aid, handing my dad his stick. And they do. Frail as leaves, they totter down the road to the vegetarian cafe: the wind could blow them away.

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Phil Elverum’s songs of loss gave me a language for that shapeshifter, grief

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After my first boyfriend died, Elverum’s Microphones and Mount Eerie helped me make sense of a bleak world

I first encountered the music of Phil Elverum in August 2010, a month after the death of my first boyfriend. That summer I spent hours sitting numbly in the park with my headphones on, listening to Elverum describe a landscape without colour or movement: “no black or white, no change in the light, no night, no golden sun”. That dissonance between internal and external worlds made sense to me as I watched children play and rollerbladers pass by in the sunshine as if everything was normal.

I listened over and over again to his album The Glow Pt 2, released in 2001 under the name the Microphones, trying to make sense of the previous six months. I met Marc in my first year at university: a pretty, hyperactive French boy who shimmered into my life at a club night in Birmingham. I fell in love with his perfect sweep of sandy blond hair, the way he played piano with the exaggerated melodrama of his beloved symphonic metal and video game soundtracks and his habit of wrapping a USB cable around his neck like a protective amulet.

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‘I’ve lost who I was’: UK pauses to reflect on year of Covid

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Twelve months after the first lockdown, bereaved relatives and long Covid survivors on how things can never be the same

A year to the day since the UK went into a historic lockdown to combat a frightening and deadly new pandemic, the nation looks back in disbelief and horror. One hundred and twenty six thousand dead. A decimated economy. The reckoning will take decades to pick over.

Tuesday’s day of reflection, organised by the cancer charity Marie Curie and backed by over 110 organisations, will be observed across the nation. A minute’s silence at midday is followed by a doorstep vigil at 8pm. Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford are expected to mark the occasion. Prominent buildings and national landmarks will be illuminated in yellow, to commemorate the dead.

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Prince Harry writes foreword to book for children who have lost parents to Covid

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Duke writes about his mother’s death in book for bereaved children as part of National Day of Reflection

The Duke of Sussex has reflected on the pain of his mother’s death in a foreword to a book for children of health workers who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Prince Harry wrote that the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 when he was 12 had left “a huge hole inside of me” but that it was eventually filled with “love and support”, according to the Times.

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What do near-death experiences mean, and why do they fascinate us?

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Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has spent decades talking to people about near-death experiences. His work raises questions about what happens when we die, and how we ought to choose to live

When Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummelled against the sandy riverbed. What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that’s what they were, were vivid and crisp. Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct. He could “hear and see as never before,” he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe. Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, “There was only darkness,” he said, “and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.”

Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did. The meeting had been organised by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group’s members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.

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My husband died a year ago. Here’s what he taught us about life and love

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A year after her husband Joe Hammond’s death from motor neurone disease, his widow reflects on grief, parenting through loss, and survival

How do you decide upon a day to die? For my husband Joe and me, that meant finding out when the doctors we needed were available, then we took note of our two sons’ school holidays and, finally, we looked at the carer rota for that month. Who could we trust with Joe’s death as much as we had trusted them with his life?

The next step was a meeting with the relevant doctors; what incredible women they had been throughout our whole, surreal journey. They asked us how we imagined the process might unfold, during which Joe would receive a huge amount of morphine to sedate him enough that his ventilator could be removed. We were bemused. What were the options? Apparently, some people choose to watch television and the programme of choice is Countdown. This gave Joe and me the giggles. We said we thought we’d manage without more conundrums than we already had.

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Coroner’s Covid findings stoke calls for inquiry into pandemic policy

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Analysis: bereaved families concerned that lessons were not learned after first wave

The failures and concerns highlighted by a senior coroner, Alison Mutch, following the deaths of two men, Anthony Slack and Leslie Harris, from Covid-19, have reinforced bereaved families’ calls for a government inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, and for more inquests.

Very few inquests have been held into deaths of people from coronavirus, following the then chief coroner’s guidance in March that Covid-19 is “a naturally occurring disease” and inquests are not normally necessary unless a person died due to additional factors, for example neglect.

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Dealing with death: Covid’s toll on UK crematoria and morgues

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‘Mortality management’ has been stretched and as fatalities pass 100k systems are again feeling the strain

When the UK’s first victim of Covid-19 died on 5 March 2020, there were only 116 recorded infections in the country and few people countenanced a death toll of 100,000.

But for government planners it was different. Emergency response experts tasked with “mortality management” braced for a death toll that they feared would dwarf anything seen since the second world war. As fatalities mounted in China and Italy, the worst-case scenario for the UK was so grim that one scheme hatched involved storing thousands of bodies in a warehouse in east London.

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The Guardian view on Ethiopia: a tragedy in the making? | Editorial

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The government’s military operation against leaders of the Tigray region could have devastating consequences across the Horn of Africa

What a difference a year makes. Just over 12 months ago, Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel peace prize. The Ethiopian prime minister had overseen extraordinary change in his brief tenure: though the committee singled out the peace deal he had signed with Eritrea, ending an apparently intractable dispute, he had also embarked upon sweeping domestic reforms. Yet while the relaxation of intense political repression brought real hope, there was also fear that the improvements were precarious at best, with too much expected of one man.

Now Africa’s second most populous nation is on the brink of civil war. In the early hours of 4 November – as the world’s attention was fixed on the United States – Mr Abiy launched a major military operation in the northern region of Tigray and imposed a state of emergency. He said he was responding to an attack by the region’s ruling party on an army base, which they have denied; the Ethiopian parliament has now voted to replace them with a centrally-imposed administration.

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Dutch government backs euthanasia for under-12s

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Dutch heath minister says change is needed to help terminally ill children

The Dutch government will permit doctors to euthanise terminally ill children aged between one and 12 after months of debate within the ruling coalition.

The country’s health minister, Hugo de Jonge, said a change in regulations was necessary to help “a small group of terminally ill children who agonise with no hope, and unbearable suffering”.

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